If you’re a civilian who has worn an N95 yourself, you can attest to the fact that they do not stay on perfectly. I recently was reminded of this fact when I wore one on a cross-country flight. I wasn’t worried since there was a mask mandate and everyone on board was wearing a mask. Even if the masks slips and I am exposed for a moment, other people are wearing a mask as well and this reduces their chance of spreading infection to others (remember “my mask protects you”?). This is what a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found as well. They looked at infection risk in a situation where a person who has the virus is speaking to someone who isn’t infected. When the person who wasn’t infected wore a well-fitting mask (a FFP2 – a European counterpart to the N95) the risk of infection was 20 percent after a hour of talking. If both parties wear surgical masks, the risk of infection increases a bit, to just under 30 percent. But when both are wearing a well-fitting mask it drops to 0.4 percent. Clearly, universal masking with quality masks is better than one-way masking, and universal masking is what the study’s authors recommend…

I get it, wearing a mask can suck. I don’t exactly enjoy it and like most people I’d rather be living life like it is 2019. That’s the final problem with one-way masking: if we can all relate to making being uncomfortable, why would we suggest that the immunocompromised and disabled be relegated to wearing a mask in perpetuity? Instead, we should all mask when transmission levels are high. We can scale back when they are lower, as I suggested last year in Slate (a traffic light system, denoting red, yellow, and green levels of caution, could help guide mandates and choices). If we share the burden of masking in public spaces, not only will vulnerable people be better protected, but cases will go down faster.