The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

People with chronic respiratory, cardiac, or other medical conditions that make breathing difficult should check with their health care provider before using an N95 respirator because the N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe.

If you're attending this weekend's Governor's Ball — New York's three-day festival that kicks off this Friday - you'll want to make sure that your packing list includes face masks, which can protect against Covid-19 variants, allergens and dust, but also the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that will likely still be ravaging much of the Northeast through the weekend.

free face masks nyc may or may not meet any fluid barrier or filtration efficiency levels; therefore, they are not a substitute for N95 respirators or other Filtering Facepiece Respirators (FFRs), which provide respiratory protection to the wearer, or for surgical masks, which provide fluid barrier protection to the wearer.