The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

More than eight months into the pandemic, health care leaders are again calling for a coordinated national strategy to distribute personal protective equipment to protect health care workers and their patients as a new wave of disease wells up across most of the country.

Despite not being regulated, there are ways for these brands and their manufacturers to increase their trustworthiness, like FDA registration or inclusion in the FDA's now-defunct emergency use authorization (EUA), which it passed in 2020 to help medical workers choose KN95 masks.

n95 mask near me in store may or may not meet any fluid barrier or filtration efficiency levels; therefore, they are not a substitute for N95 respirators or other Filtering Facepiece Respirators (FFRs), which provide respiratory protection to the wearer, or for surgical masks, which provide fluid barrier protection to the wearer.