Would you please stop creating accounts for every comment or two you post? This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need to have some consistent identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community at all, and that would be a very different kind of forum. There are legit uses for throwaways, just not routinely. Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Algolia: "No stories matching by:dang community identity"

Whoops - fixed now.

(I made a change to the HN moderation software that caused it to start escaping characters it shouldn't, and haven't fixed the bug yet.)

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Dan clearly made some sort of typo in that URL.

Apparently anything can - and most often will - attract downvotes here. Not only controversial or negatively framed or opinionated or poorly stated or patently incorrect comments, but plain, simple, incontrovertible statements of fact as my Algolia one above.

To the extent that I sometimes wonder if someone out there is going a bit too systematically about it.

Not being able to buy a necessity gets you in a scary and impotent situation. I’ve seen that twice in my city, the first one was when an unusual cold winter arrived, temperatures went down to -25 Celsius, maybe that doesn’t sound as much for people who live in cold places, but for my city in Northern Mexico that was amazingly cold. Our infrastructure colapsed, electricity went down, internet and cellphone antennas went down with it, there was LP shortage, old trees died, few people had running water since a lot of pipes were broken. And since everyone was trying to fix their pipes at the same time there was a shortage of tubes and consumables, people spent days and weeks without water.

The second time in 2009 with H1N1’s outbreak, we ran out of masks in a couple of hours.

Situations like that made me realize how vulnerable our societies can be in big events.

If you want to be sure the mask fits correctly you can simulate the procedure here which is basically wearing the mask with a larger plastic bag/enclosure over you and having some spray a aerosolized bitter compound in the air around your head [pdf]: http://www.kdheks.gov/cphp/download/Fit_Test_Pro_for_N95_R.p...

This is how you get fit tested in hospitals. I'll also add that n95 masks are considered overkill for influenza (but not SARS, TB, measles, varicella aka chickenpox).

Also, get your flu shot every year! Even if it isn't optimized against the antigens on this years virus it is like a brick in a wall your immune system builds up over time against a variety of influenza variations.

I lived in heavy pollution this summer due to forrest fires. I bought N95s and wore them walking around town. Totally annoying, looked weird although I wasn't the only one doing it, sweaty, but they did help.

The one thing I realized quickly was that I could not take the mask off without completely f-ing up the sterile field created by the mask. Outside of the mask smeared all over my face, outside of the mask hitting me in the eye as my glasses got hung up, etc.

If you can't doff an N95 correctly, keeping the exterior of the mask from your hand, facial skin, and mucous membranes, they won't actually block anything viral or bacterial.

Gave me a whole additional level of appreciation for the doctors and medical professionals working with Ebola patients couple years back and a greater understanding of why they fell ill despite what seemed to be bulletproof PPE.

I wouldn’t trust my life to a respirator mask I bought from Amazon. How would I know I didn’t get a fake?

It has NIOSH approval printed right on it. Or, at least, written in crayon.

Aye. I now assume "Fulfilled by Amazon" means there's a real chance of counterfeit. If getting the real thing matters, I take my custom elsewhere.

Additional benefit from wearing mask is that it prevents you from touching your face.

Touching with the mouth, eyes, and/or nostrils with your contaminated hand is substantial source of respiratory virus infections.

People touch their face an average of 3 - 4 times per hour, and common objects an average of 3 times per hour. In some kind of sitting office work it can be 10-15 times per hour.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18357546