#n95s

[pandemic-info]

SARS-CoV-2, CO2, and You

A good video about how CO2 monitors work and how you can analyze the information they give you to protect against airborne diseases.

And the companion video about masking:

[nowthisnews]

100,000 counterfeit N-95 surgical masks were confiscated by Customs and Border Protection agents in El Paso, TX, this week. The masks, branded as 3M, were valued at $600,000 and were intended for hospital workers on the East Coast 😷

follow @nowthisnews for daily news videos & more

[collapsedsquid]

As smoke fills air, California farmworkers labor to put food on the table

Wildfire smoke compounds the pandemic and the heat wave, worsening already difficult conditions for farmworkers. But stopping work means more food waste and empty grocery store shelves.

Yellow, ash-filled skies blanketed the Salinas Valley fields that supply much of the nation’s lettuce, strawberries and other fresh produce as wildfires from all sides blazed.

But the raging wildfires don’t stop the harvest, and many farmers said they had no choice this week but to plow on through the smoke to put food into stores and onto tables. That means farmworkers had to work in conditions already made extremely difficult by the heat wave and pandemic.

“The crops are ready today, and you can’t wait until tomorrow, because these are succulent fruits and vegetables that have to be picked when they’re ready and when they’re ripe in order to get them to the market,” Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner Henry Gonzales explained. “We have to harvest every day ... because people eat every day.”

The fields are often in the smokiest and hottest parts of the state during this heatwave/firestorm

[wat3rm370n]

Federal News Network - HHS reinstates all laid-off employees at workplace safety agency NIOSH HHS walked back about a third of NIOSH layoffs last spring, but is now reinstating all NIOSH employees who received reduction-in-force notices. January 14, 2026 6:18 pm Last May, after pressure from unions and bipartisan pushback from lawmakers, HHS partially reversed course and reinstated 328 of the 1,000 terminated NIOSH employees. The reinstatements brought back NIOSH employees working in coal mining research programs in Ohio and West Virginia, as well as employees working in the agency’s World Trade Center Health Program, which supports 9/11 first responders. Micah Niemeier-Walsh, a NIOSH employee and vice president of AFGE Local 3840, said NIOSH employees and unions “have been fighting relentlessly” to full reinstatement of terminated staff. “We still have a long road ahead of us. We have a lot of rebuilding to do,” she said. “It’s going to take some time to get projects moving again.” Niemeier-Walsh said laid-off NIOSH employees have been on paid administrative leave for about nine months, preventing hundreds of federal scientists from carrying out their research.

[wat3rm370n]

Many people still don’t really know how respirator masks work.

It’s really no wonder people are susceptible to anti-mask propaganda undermining masks as an effective way to control the spread of aerosol transmitted diseases when the fact is, public health leadership has failed to properly explain to the public how respirator masks work.

I invite people to read the various ways people have misunderstood how masks work that I’ve heard about — and in some cases understandably misinterpreted concepts they’ve seen online about respirator masks. Sometimes wrongly people think that masks have a self-destruct time limit, or that there’s some time to infectious dose with or without a mask, when neither of these ideas are accurate. Those mask chart meme infographics that have circulated on social media and forums for years now have led people to think as long as they go outside every 30 minutes they can “reset the time” they’ll be safe in an infectious environment.

https://teamshuman.substack.com/p/upgrade-your-masking-chart-explained

Unfortunately a lot of these misunderstandings feed into all or nothing fatalism propaganda. And a lot of stuff out there doing armchair science get into the weeds in ways that simply foster more confusion.

The physics hasn’t changed on respirator masks. There are no guarantees and nothing is perfect but the N95 mask still does the job.

The Astounding Physics of N95 Masks by MinutePhysics “By electretizing the fibers in an N95 mask, they gain a long-lasting ability to attract particles, which means they capture about 10 times as many particles as regular fibers.”

(pandemic newsletter on substack)

[wat3rm370n]

Ableist mask bans raise questions of how they could be enforced, and also questions about why there’s not another way to deal with the issue of juvenile delinquent vandals.

The Press of Atlantic City - Ocean City raises, rejects banning masks on the Boardwalk - Bill Barlow Jun 17, 2024 Even in the discussion phase, Campbell said, the ordinance was to include exemptions for religious practice and health concerns. Some people continue to wear masks in crowds, and some people with compromised immune systems or other medical conditions always will. Campbell compared the proposed ordinance with a ban on backpacks on the beach and Boardwalk after 8 p.m., a move he supported. Where there have been issues with juveniles, he said, many carried fireworks, alcohol or illegal drugs in backpacks. “Whatever they had with them, the contents were in the backpack,” he said. Philadelphia had approved a ban on masks, he said, but that is not being enforced. In New York, there was a state ban on masks for more than a century, repealed during the pandemic. There has been discussion of reenacting that ban. Levchuk said he spoke with other members of council after some merchants raised the possibility of banning face coverings. “It seemed worth bringing it to the administration,” he said, specifically so that the matter could be researched. He said he would not push for an ordinance that would create hardships for the police or would raise questions of how it could be enforced.

Frankly the Wildwood backpack ban seems ableist to me. I remember going to Lollapalooza in 1992 and in our carpool group was a diabetic who had to carry a little backpack with supplies bigger than 8 inches. 

Why can't they find another way to deter crime for pity's sake? In a time of security cameras everywhere, advanced monitoring capabilities, modern technology - why is it so much harder to deter or otherwise deal with juvenile delinquents and vandals than in the past, that we need all these authoritarian restrictions on your person?

[wat3rm370n]

The pandemic era is now, and mask bans are unethical.

Mask bans prohibit and inhibit use of respiratory protection that can prevent disease spread and protection from pollution inhalation, and banning or inhibiting that ability to protect oneself against the elements, coerces people, especially high risk disabled people, away from public engagement and participating in the community. This is a grotesque injustice.

WRAL - Protesters who wear masks or block traffic should face harsher penalties: NC lawmakers - A bill proposing harsher punishments against protesters comes as protests over the Israel-Hamas conflict have been staged on college campuses in recent months. The idea met no resistance in a state Senate committee Tuesday. May 7 2024 It has been a crime since the 1950s to wear a mask in public in North Carolina. But the state has also created a list of various exceptions to that law, which was expanded during the Covid-19 pandemic to include “any person wearing a mask for the purpose of ensuring the physical health or safety of the wearer or others.” Newton’s bill would delete that language, although he said he thought other state laws might still protect people who have a legitimate medical need to wear a mask. Newton told reporters he believes some people are exploiting Covid-era social norms of mask-wearing, as an excuse to hide their identities. “This isn’t just about the protests,” he said. “I think it’s clear people are seizing the opportunity to do things they’re not supposed to do, to break the law or to intimidate people, and keep their identities hidden. It’s time for that to stop.”

People wear respirator masks for a variety of health reasons. Allergies, infectious disease, air pollution, and when dealing with stirred up particulates. It is a fundamental life function for humans to avoid harm from the elements. Imagine banning winter coats, shoes, or blood pressure pills. 

There’s no way to make a mask ban where you can seriously assume that “other laws” will protect disabled people from police on high alert, who may knock someone down, unmask and infect them, and then ask questions later, after it’s too late and the victim is dead of covid or has injuries sustained from police, and all because of being erroneously under suspicion for nothing more than being masked somewhere there’s a mask ban. How does one ask in advance for ADA accommodation in public spaces broadly? And how would that be managed bureaucratically and by what government agencies? And please let’s not bring up again the idea of pandemic buttons and having disabled people wear symbols of disability. Wearing sashes and carrying special dispensation papers should not be required to move about in society.

It should not be illegal merely to exist unassuming and practically anonymous in public anyway. “Papers, please!” is not really the mark of a free society.

Employers are getting away with disallowing employees from masking and protecting themselves — even if they have a family member at home who is in extremely fragile health, because rules in employment situations may only cover the employee, not their family members. It’s presumptuous and foolhardy to assume that there will be exceptions made for this situation elsewhere.

Merely wearing a mask is not enough to “keep identities hidden” anyway. We know that facial recognition software is not impeded by medical masks - and even dazzle is now ineffective from the latest iterations of computer identification capabilities.

If someone gets arrested, taken into custody, and booked, a medical mask isn’t going to prevent the police from learning the person’s identity.

I’m not worried about right-wingers wearing gaiters over their mouths and noses, because at least when they’re shouting it will hinder the distance their germs will go. And we know that masks are not what have hindered police prevention of violence, it was failures in leadership both at the January 6th insurrection and at the UCLA protests against the razing of Gaza.

Masking for medical reasons was politicized by Republican politicians in 2020 and refusing to mask has long been a conservative form of political virtue signaling one’s MAGA fealty to Trumpism. Republicans claimed that mask mandates were partisan political, and since we know their penchant for Accusation in a Mirror (“every accusation is a confession”), we can be fairly sure that mask bans are nothing more than conservative efforts at partisan political virtue signaling.

We know that anti-mask is part of the far-right Republican political platform. There’s been a business interest fueled right-wing anti-mask political agenda all along, because they believe masks “remind people of the danger” of infectious diseases and that danger leads many people to avoid certain economic activities like commuting to in-person office jobs and travel, which Republicans don’t like because their donors for example in the commercial real estate and the fossil fuel industry don’t like it.

The truth is that there has been a disinformation PR campaign to convince people that disabled people avoiding infection are the ones causing the covid problem. Dark money funded disinformation should not be the basis for threatening the health of people in the community.

Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign...

The pandemic era is now, and mask bans are unethical.

Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign, fueled by business interests, and promoted by a partisan Republican agenda for right-wing virtue

[wat3rm370n]

The shadowbanning of the pandemic.

SEO has nerfed the topic. Shadowbanning is why many people don’t hear about the pandemic continuing and often don’t find info about public health on the internet. I have repeatedly talked about this SEO issue, but precious few listen. I have recently posted documentation of the shadowbanning of Nicolas Smit. You can go down a whole ‘nother road with the CDC aerosol transmission timeline, and how the Trump administration eschewed elastomerics so nurses would have to reuse N95s in 2020, and that meant some company would get the contracts to clean them — and what’s more, they shipped N95s off to other countries ensuring a shortage would continue! Then after the shortage was no more, and hospitals had stockpiles of N95s, they were still rationing them and keeping them from nurses. And then the Biden administration continued to prohibit advertising of N95s long after shortages were over. It took until June 2023, for Nicolas Smit to get anywhere with the Biden administration, in lifting this advertising ban and Google announcing they’d stop censoring mask manufacturers already! And then Nicolas Smit was shadowbanned on Twitter. There were loads of people yelling about this stuff. Into a void with little coverage. And yet, strangely, you don’t hear about this from Matt Taiibbi. Nor anyone else much really.

And this is just one data point really, of how the pandemic and public health issues have been nerfed on the internet.