I’ve seen the headline that “masks won’t help you so don’t bother buying them” about a million times over the past month. But when you start to dig into the jus

I’ve seen the headline that “masks won’t help you so don’t bother buying them” about a million times over the past month. But when you start to dig into the justification behind that, it’s loaded with assumptions - that I, the layperson, won’t have an N-95 mask, I won’t wear it properly, I’ll leave it somewhere after it’s contaminated and it will make someone else sick. When you dig past this with the people telling you not to bother wearing a mask, another line of reasoning bubbles up - that we need to reserve them for healthcare workers. It may be true that it’s most important to get N-95 masks into the hands of healthcare workers first, but lying to the public isn’t the right way to do it. It turns out that plenty of people are capable of understanding how to wear a mask properly, and a lot of them - myself included - May already have access to N-95 masks, like the handful I bought to wear while doing a home improvement project about six months ago. I have to agree that more than anything else, this line of commentary that masks won’t work comes off as holier than though finger wagging. It’s at least partially a lie, and it strikes me as an ineffective way to deal with the problem of a shortage of masks for healthcare workers. I also doubt that the masks on the shelf at Home Depot were ever going to find their way into the hands of a healthcare worker if they hadn’t already.