"Saving Your Health, One Mask at a Time"

thought this had some good information, tips, and easy to read. the following is from the article:

"So How Does a Mask Really Work?

It hasn't been measured for COVID, but I suspect that almost any mask, no matter how poor, is more effective than a seat belt is in your car. Masks that are FDA-cleared have been tested against a benchmark and have a rating. N95 masks have been shown to reduce 95% of passage of a certain size particle over a certain time period in specific laboratory conditions.

When I worked in a pre-COVID ER, I would change masks 6-12 times in a shift. However well it works in the test lab, wearing the same mask (N95 or not) for a 12-hour ER shift is definitely not as strong as using a fresh one—let alone using the same mask for a week. But it is far stronger than not wearing any mask at all. N95s have benefits over the simple dust masks typically used during construction work, for example, such as: (a) they are more comfortable to wear, (b) the air is more likely to go through the mask than around it, (c) exhaled air is less likely to fog your glasses, and (d) inhaled air is a bit less restricted.

These are similar characteristics to the beneficial properties of cloth masks. So I am a big fan of cloth masks, even very simple ones. Any mask has 3 main protective properties:

They make it hard to touch your nose and mouth, thus providing great protection for what is the biggest infection vector in most situations -- hand-to-face transmission.
They reduce the exposure of your nose and mouth to viruses in the ambient air (directly breathing in viral spray or viral fog).
They reduce the chance that others will get infected from you when you are sick and don't know it (and when you are sick and do know it!).
Great masks and poor masks can both stop water droplets. Most coughs and sneezes are really composed of a fine spray of water droplets soaked with virus. Stopping the droplets also stops the virus. Dry virus "dies" (see Caveat 2) very quickly so even though individual virus particles are extremely tiny and can enter in the air around a mask, or even go through the mask, they are less likely to infect you than a droplet teeming with viruses being kept “alive” by the droplet. The most likely way a dose of virus will get in your nose or mouth is:

Via touch of your own hand (most likely by far)
Via water droplet-laden virus (cough, sneeze or even breathing)
Via free (or dry) virus “particles” (least worrisome)

snip

So even if the outside of the box of Cheerios was contaminated a few hours ago by a sick shopper touching it, by the time you get it home, 99.9% of it is probably already dead, and by the time you eat breakfast tomorrow, after the box sitting in your dry cupboard, another 99.9% of it is likely dead.

Please don’t get sucked into breathless worry because the scientist who (correctly) shows that it is “possible” to find some live virus on cardboard after 2 days. Although true, the risk is infinitesimal. That scientist can find the last two living viruses, but you need a much bigger dose to cause any harm and in most cases that all went away yesterday. "

a lot more

https://www.linkedin.com/content-guest/article/saving-your-health-one-mask-time-peter-tippett-md-phd?fbclid=IwAR0sNnjBkim9q4OkZj1Ufs2V2XMDmGzYllhlW3nPvHr7kDIFaWhnBzKonWg