N95

by Steffi Toma

I made my spring break plans long before anyone had heard of coronavirus, but by the time February ended, it had been on the news enough to make my mom worry about me travelling. She’s a school nurse, so when it came time for me to pack my bags, she took a face mask from her supplies at the clinic and asked me to bring it along. It was an N95, the high quality kind of respirator that has to be specifically fitted to the user’s face. When they’re worn properly, N95 masks filter out ninety five percent of particles in the air, even particles as tiny as 0.3 microns. That’s hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Medical workers wear them when treating patients with diseases that are transmitted through droplets in the air, like tuberculosis and SARS. It sounded like overkill to me, but I stuck the mask into the bottom of my backpack anyway, just to humor her.

I didn’t think of it again, not even when I arrived in Copenhagen to find the friend I was visiting worrying that her study abroad program would be cancelled, or when I was asked four times by four different airport security officials if I had visited Italy or China in the past fourteen days, or when I arrived back home in Virginia just a few hours before the president announced a ban on travel to and from Europe. I had never seen the airport so empty before: it only took me ten minutes to get through customs. The officer who checked my passport was wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask over his face. I was sleep deprived and impatient to get home after a long flight, but I still paused to wonder if the mask would do him any good. It wasn’t an N95, just a regular surgical mask with no seal at the edges. If someone coughed on his face it would probably block droplets of spit going into his mouth, and if he were sick it would stop him from spreading the virus to anyone else. But the open sides of the mask wouldn’t stop particles coming in, and it certainly wouldn’t filter something as tiny as a virus out of the air he breathed.

The respirator stayed in my backpack when I got home, sitting forgotten on the floor of my bedroom until my mom told me that she and all the other school nurses were being called in as part of the Arlington County coronavirus response team. I dug the mask out of my bag then, thinking of the news reports I’d read about doctors and nurses getting sick themselves after going to work without the protection they needed. The plastic wrapper was crumpled at the edges from being shuffled around at the bottom of my bag for a week, but the mask inside was unharmed. I gave it back to my mom, suddenly very glad that I hadn’t worn it. They’re single use, made to last for only a few hours and then be thrown away. It would have been useless if I had already worn it, and she needed it more than I did.