Now it is almost a common sense that face mask does not protect people from corona virus. The main reasons are :
1. The corona virus is 0.05-0.2 micron which is able to penetrate face mask to come on your face. N95 face mask can filter at least 0.3 micron particles. Disposable medical mask is worse than N95 in terms of filtering.
2. Face mask can have some protection to some degree if they strictly follow the protocol of wearing mask. But people often need to touch the mask when wearing, need to take it off when having a meal and the contaminated hands will make infection possible.
3. The virus can go into mask from space left between skin and mask edge. N95 face mask has a better seal than medical mask, but virus can still get in.
4. There was a study in America that shows face mask does not work at all when coping with influenza. It also applies to corona virus.
CDC in America gave people advice of how to protect themselves from corona virus. It is to wash hands with soap and practice distancing from other people. They never recommend people to wear face mask because it does not work to regular people. But look around at China under panic, almost all Chinese rush to buy face mask unreasonably. This brought a super high demand of mask and a serious supply shortage which turns out pushing the market price unbelievably high and making a lot of Chinese millionaire. People who make mask just are getting rich overnight. We see more and more people have been joining the production of mask hoping to earn quick money. Everybody working in the face mask supply chain benefits from this shortage including the seller, manufacturer, mask machine maker, raw material supplier etc. People who works in machinery industry started to make mask machine, raw materials price are also crazy. People are taking advantage of this opportunity.
At the moment, domestic supply and demand tends to get balanced, but the profit margin is still unbelievably high which is supposed to last for some period of time. People who make mask also begin to turn their attention to the overseas market because the overseas are still in pandemic which means a big opportunity. But the process of selling mask to overseas market is not that smooth.
Many countries and areas has restriction for importation of face mask like EU where you need to get CE certificate to get in. We see a lot of unauthorized CE certificates in China are being made. Some institutions without having authorization are making CE certificates. So-called Italian ECM is one of them. They can make you a certificate within 5 working days. A regular CE certificate takes at least 3 months to make which makes nonsense for taking advantage of this pandemic opportunity.
Google bans face mask ads on their search engine during the pandemic, which makes selling through Google ads impossible. They do this because they do not want people to take advantage of this pandemic and people’s panic to spread rumor to earn quick and easy money. Face mask does not work for regular people and Google is doing this from a moral standpoint. On Alibaba.com, face mask is still available but no corona virus words are allowed to appear on any product page.