zlacker

Re: masks, you need to remember that China pretty much shut down all exports of PPE to keep it for domestic use. There wasn’t much more the rest of the world could have done to follow that directive. Even those of us that did have some stockpiled were asked to donate them to hospitals. Masks were hard to come by for a while until a cottage industry popped up to create second-rate masks.

>>maland+(OP)
I am actually very unhappy about this. I knew that masks were reusable. The advice against reuse explains why they are reusable under the right conditions.

But then I gave away my N95 mask stockpile (years old¹) in a moment of weakness because local medical personnel appealed on the Internet. I regret it entirely because I didn't want to do it, had concrete rational reasons not to do it, and then I felt bad when they appealed and did it anyway.

I really regret the emotional hijack. I'll never let it happen again. I just know they used those masks once and threw them away. Or maybe they used them zero times because they couldn't tell if they're safe because they're from the public. I really really regret it.

¹ Because CA sees wildfires everyone I know has boxes of these. And old ones are not supposed to be used either, but the only common failure mode over ten years isn't filtration, it's the elastic, which was fine on mine.