Mar compiled and publicize List her recommendations for baby masks.
There is also a new voluntary standard for face masks. it’s called ASTM F3502-21It is published by an international organization that sets voluntary standards for thousands of products. In order to claim that a mask meets this standard, the manufacturer must test their mask and demonstrate that it provides a certain level of filtration and breathability.
However, not everyone agrees that the standard is appropriate.
“It’s pretty much useless. Aaron Collins, who calls himself @masknerd on Twitter, says the max class is a 50% filtering efficiency. That might have been a good fit for the original coronavirus, but ‘now that we’re talking about alpha’,” he says. And the delta, moreover, is not viable anymore.” “We have passed that standard.”
Collins is a mechanical engineer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with an experience that started testing face masks last year as a way to find a good, protective mask for himself. Soon the project grew. Now he’s posting his test results and debunking common myths about the masks (yes, if you can smell through them, they’re still protective. Smells are fumes, not particles, he explains) on youtube.
He stopped testing over the summer, but said parents bombard him with questions about baby masks, so he started testing them again. He has a 5-year-old son.
“We have a big problem in the United States, which is that there is no general population standard for face masks,” Collins says. “Now we have this problem, that we need kids with better masks, and we don’t have a standard,” he says.
NIOSH sets standards for professional masks, such as the N95. But their standards do not apply to people who need them for public use. Collins says it will likely fall to the Food and Drug Administration to set a standard like this and, more importantly, enforce it.
Based on his tests, parents recommend trying to find the KF94 mask from South Korea. He says their performance is roughly equivalent to an N95, and he’s encountered fewer cases of counterfeiting with these types of masks. If KF94s are sold, as is often the case, he recommends looking for a KN95 mask from a company that sells KF94s. He once obtained an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration For health care workers. The EUA has been scrapped as the supply of N95 masks increases, but he says the masks on that list are more reliable.