Originally Posted by jmastron

I just took a field trip to my garage and took pictures of 2 types of N95s with valve. The first one has a valve in the center, with a circular rubber flap. As you can see where I used a nail to demonstrate, when you exhale the valve opens and allows air and droplets to escape in all directions unimpeded (perhaps blocked a bit straight in front, but what goes up will come down). There’s no cloth or filter; when that flap opens it’s open. The second does have a bit of directionality but not much -- air/droplets can go out down/slightly forward and sideways.

These simply aren’t meant to prevent droplets from leaving the wearer’s face, which is fine for most dust/fume/industrial uses. Whether someone who makes money selling them calls that out or not.

I’m not saying there aren’t others that do have some sort of filter or cloth in addition to the valve (but I don’t understand that completely, since the whole mask is the filter), but virtually all of the ones I’ve seen people wearing are like above. As Flybitcoin says, a simple cloth or mask over it solves the problem.