A week after the White House announced a plan to provide 400 million free N95 masks to people in the U.S., the goods have arrived.
The non-surgical masks, which come from the United States’ National Strategic Stockpile and are set to be distributed via local pharmacies across the country, have reportedly already started arriving in stores. “Last week, masks began shipping and arriving at pharmacies and grocers around [the] country,” a White House official told CNN.
The first masks have arrived in the Midwest. So far, free N95 masks have reportedly arrived in Meijer stores in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Wisconsin, and in Hy-Vee stores in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansans, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Southern states are also expected to receive masks this week. More shipments are expected to arrive at Southeastern Grocers later this week, including at Fresco y Más, Harveys Supermarket, and Winn-Dixie store pharmacies, according to CNN.
“We expect that throughout the week the number of stores and N95s arriving to scale up significantly,” the administration official told CNN. That will include providing free masks to CVS and Walgreens stores across the country, with the latter chain expecting to start receiving masks this week, per CNN. Community health centers are also part of the rollout plan. “For now, the program is limited to around 300 Community Health Centers to ensure the logistics of receiving, storing and distributing the masks are worked out,” Amy Simmons Farber, a spokesperson for the National Association of Community Health Centers, told CNN. “Our understanding is the program will be widened to include more health centers as part of the Biden Administration’s effort to ensure underserved communities have equitable access to public health tools.”
The mask shipments are arriving not a moment too soon. Omicron cases may be falling in many parts of the country, but that doesn’t mean the surge is over—hundreds of thousands of new COVID cases are still being reported daily. Earlier this month, health experts began recommending N95s as the best mask for blocking coronavirus particles over inferior cloth masks, as SELF reported. Against the highly contagious omicron variant, “cloth masks are little more than facial decorations,” CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, M.D., told the news outlet. A cloth mask (or, even better, a surgical mask) is better than nothing, but last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially updated its guidelines to confirm non-surgical N95 masks offer the “highest level of protection.”
N95s have been challenging to find over the past several months, with reports of fake masks and exorbitant prices complicating the rise in demand. The free N95 masks are an attempt to get more highly-protective masks into the hands of people across the country. As soon as masks arrive at a location near you, you’ll be eligible to receive three free N95 masks (though, as SELF previously reported, the distribution plan doesn’t currently include child-sized masks).
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