I wore P100 and FFP3 elastomeric respirators at various times pre-vaccine during the pandemic in California and Europe, as did several of my relatives. Places

I wore P100 and FFP3 elastomeric respirators at various times pre-vaccine during the pandemic in California and Europe, as did several of my relatives. Places that understood the problem did care, and many hospitals and medical centres did not allow them for specifically this reason, for example; some accepted them if they were modified to have a filter over the vent, others did not. Most would tell you in advance, but some would not. I came to carry non-vent FFP2s with me as a result, particularly after being harassed by the TSA over it (I suppose they didn't have anything better to do, as I was literally the only passenger going through security at the time, in a major international terminal). With that said, views on higher spec masks were very arbitrary throughout the pandemic. In one particularly weird case, my partner left a state-run testing centre in Ireland when she arrived with an FFP3 respirator and the staff demanded that she and everyone else wait in poorly ventilated spaces while wearing loose fitting surgical masks they provided because then everyone could be confident everyone was wearing the same masks...