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.

More than eight months into the pandemic, health care leaders are again calling for a coordinated national strategy to distribute personal protective equipment to protect health care workers and their patients as a new wave of disease wells up across most of the country.

Despite not being regulated, there are ways for these brands and their manufacturers to increase their trustworthiness, like FDA registration or inclusion in the FDA's now-defunct emergency use authorization (EUA), which it passed in 2020 to help medical workers choose KN95 masks.

Miller also previously told us that the list of KN95 models the FDA specifically approved in its April 2020 emergency use authorization Bookmarks is one of the best resources to use when sourcing the respirators, even after the FDA stopped updating the list in 2021.