3. Throw Out Those Cloth Masks

When I boarded my Lufthansa flight to Germany in September, I was sporting a stylish cloth mask embroidered with the logo of one of my favorite organizations. As I entered the plane, a flight attendant politely stopped me. Handing me a surgical FFP2 mask (which is similar to those marketed as a KN95 in the United States), she told me that cloth masks were not approved for use aboard the airplane. The same rule, it turns out, applies to most public spaces in Germany.

At the beginning of the pandemic, every country in the world faced a desperate shortage of high-quality masks. With doctors’ offices and hospitals running short on personal protective equipment, improvised cloth masks helped keep millions of people safe. Their rapid adoption was a great feat of human ingenuity.

But studies soon suggested that cloth masks are less effective than surgical masks at stopping the spread of COVID-19. And so once FFP2 masks became widely available, Germany encouraged its citizens to wear them instead. They are now so ubiquitous that I don’t recall having seen a single cloth mask since arriving in the country a month ago.