We started Fix the Mask for a variety of reasons, but among the biggest is the fact that our father is asthmatic and immunocompromised. …

Life Happens. If you’re traveling this season for reasons beyond your control, we have some common sense ways to reduce your risk. — To be clear, we don’t recommend you travel this holiday season, and we’re not public health experts. But sometimes life happens. A close friend of Fix the Mask is driving across the country to take care of his mom while she recovers from heart surgery, and he wanted to know…

Data Updated: 2/12/2021 Text Update: 01/24/2023 — test lab citation added We’ve tested the most common masks that we could find. This is how they stack up. Test Method The problem with mask testing is that most testing standards have a lot of variability. Getting in touch with the main mask testing…

To answer this, let’s take a step back and understand the purpose of wearing a mask in the first place. A mask as a net for your face. This net keeps bad things out, like a mosquito net. …

We know that the Essential Mask Brace better secures any filtration material to the wearer’s face. But what materials are recommended? We tested different cloth masks stack-ups through the NIOSH test method to truly get an ‘apples to apples’ performance comparison. Results: cloth masks, even multi-layer ones, don’t filter well…

Latest fit and filtration data for the Essential Mask Brace. Last Updated 10/19/2020 Background According to recent statistical analysis, 75% of people need to be wearing masks that are 75% effective in order to slow the pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is spread through aerosolized particles that are emitted through activities such as breathing…

The world has a global shortage of N95 respirator. What can we do? After diving into the problem myself, I realized that this is just a symptom of a larger problem. This problem is so much bigger than just masks. But for this blog post, we will just focus on…

Latest fit and filtration data for V1.0 and V2.0. Last Updated 5/24/2020 Fit Data There are two ways to validate mask fit that are widely used in hospitals. The first if the Saccharin/Bitrex Test, which involves shoving your head in a bag while an unpleasant gas is released — if you can…

Is it true that surgical mask material can never be as good as N95 material? — Last Edited: 10/27/2020 What’s the difference between SM and N95s? As you can see below, while N95s have an extra layer, filtration is not the extra layer’s main function. The melt blown fabric layer is the part that does the bulk of the filtration, as you can see from the relative scales of the spun-bond vs melt…