3M MEDICAL (surgical)
Tie-on Surgical Mask with FS3M-1818fs
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Respirator Standard
The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) cites the N95 respirator standard as part of the advised protective equipment in their Covid-19 FAQ and their SARS guidance (SARS being a similar type of Corona virus). Which suggests that an N95 or better respirator is acceptable.
Whilst surgical style masks are not redundant by any means (discussed more below), they aren’t designed to protect the wearer, whilst respirators are.
N95 vs FFP3 & FFP2
The most commonly discussed respirator type is N95. This is an American standard managed by NIOSH – part of the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Europe uses a “filtering face piece” score (FFP). This comes from EN standard 149:2001 – drafted and maintained by CEN (European Committee for Standardization). Let’s see how they compare:
Respirator Standard | Filter Capacity (removes x% of of all particles that are 0.3 microns in diameter or larger) |
---|---|
FFP1 | 80% |
FFP2 | 94% |
N95 | 95% |
FFP3 | 99.95% |
N100 | 99.97% |
As you can see, the closest European equivalent to N95 is an FFP2 (also referred to as P2) rated respirator, which is rated at 94%, compared to the 95% of N95. Likewise, 99.95% FFP3 (P3) rated respirators are most comparable to the 99.97% of N100.

It’s definitely fair to note that this Australian study was very small, and could not be considered definitive by any means. That being said, we’ve got to work with what he have, and this at least gives us some data points:
- Wearing a surgical mask or N95 (FFP2) respirator was better (in the study) at protecting against influenza-like illnesses than wearing nothing at all
- Whilst we can anticipate surgical masks to be inferior to respirators, the studies above suggest they are not as inferior as one might assume. For example the first two studies didn’t find a significant difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators, when protecting wearers against influenza.
- Important to note that we’ve used influenza protection as a proxy for SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus). This is done because SARS-CoV-2 is new and there are no comparable studies on it. But of course the drawback is that it still leaves a lot of uncertainty, as SARS-CoV-2 may act quite differenty in terms of transmission.
In a lab setting, with artificial conditions, we find that surgical masks are able to block 80% of particles down to 0.007 microns. Compared to the 3M 8812 respirator in this study which blocked 96% (FFP1 rated).