Shop towels filter better than T-shirts for DIY coronavirus masks

After President Trump said Friday Americans can wear face masks (if they want to) — and experts now say they can help stop the coronavirus — people are going DIY, making their own face protectors in droves.
But a small clothing manufacturer in Los Angeles says not to use T-shirt material, as the government suggested, but blue shop towels instead.
Using blue shop towels in homemade face masks can filter particles two to three times better than cotton, according to Lindsay Medoff, the CEO of Suay Sew Shop.
Medoff and her pal Chloe Schempf were appalled that all the instructions for DYI face masks called for porous cotton weaves which couldn’t filter microscopic pathogen particles, and became obsessed with finding a fabric better suited for the job.
They built a lab that could test particle filtration down to 0.3 microns and tested every fabric they could find, from coffee filters to industrial materials.

Medoff was even more disgusted at the recommendations to use a bandana.
“The recommendation of a bandana made me ill,” Schempf told Business Insider. “I couldn’t understand how we can go from a 2020 N95 mask to a 1918-era cotton mask with a variable filtration of 20% to 60%.”
The ideal material turned out to be stretchy blue shop towels made from a polyester hydro knit.

So Schempf, Medoff, and Medoff’s business partner, Heather Pavlu, a co-owner of Suay Sew Shop, researched proper materials and found “by adding two blue shop towels and using a design that produces a tighter-fitting mask, they could make a mask that could block up to 95% of the particles, while the cotton masks blocked 20% to 60% of the particles,” according to Business Insider.
The women are currently sewing their new masks and giving them (and the design) away while raising money to pay their workers.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/04/shop-towels-filter-better-than-t-shirts-for-diy-coronavirus-masks/