White House To Distribute Free N95 Masks: Where To Get Them In NJ

NEW JERSEY — Some 400 million N95 masks will be available for free to all Americans beginning next week.

The masks will be released from the Strategic National Stockpile and will be available for pickup at local community health centers and pharmacies, the Associated Press reported.

Details of the plan — part of a broader administration program to blunt the spread of COVID-19 — were still emerging. The White House is expected to announce formal details about the distribution plan Wednesday. In general, the N95 masks will be available for pickup late next week at pharmacies and health centers in New Jersey that partnered with the federal government's COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

People can get up to three masks, the White House said, “to ensure broad access for all Americans.”

New Jerseyans may want to pick up their free N95 masks sooner rather than later as sore cities and towns in New Jersey have announced indoor mask mandates. East Orange, Hoboken, Maplewood, Montclair, Asbury Park, Morristown, Newark and others are all enforcing indoor masking policies amid the omicron variant. In cities such as Asbury Park, face masks are currently required in bars, restaurants, gyms, grocery stores, places of worship and more. Read more: Indoor Mask Mandate Issued For Asbury Park

Parents of K-12 students in the Garden State may also want to pick up the freebies for their children, as mask mandates in New Jersey schools are expected to continue “for the foreseeable future,” according to Gov. Phil Murphy.

"Not forever and always, but we cannot responsibly, in the teeth of this tsunami, change gears on this [mandate],” Murphy said earlier this month as his previous masking mandate was set to expire. “If you had asked me six weeks ago did I have some hope that on January 11 at midnight, we might be able to shift to a different reality? Yeah, I did have that hope, and we're going to get to that point sooner than later. We will not and cannot get there in the near term."

The nationwide N95 mask distribution is part of a wider COVID-19 response plan that included this week's rollout of a website where Americans can sign up to receive free coronavirus rapid tests.

The release still leaves the United States with a reserve of 350,000 of the highly protective N95 masks, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said offer better protection against the coronavirus's omicron variant than cloth face coverings. N95 and KN95 masks are more widely available now than they were early in the pandemic, but costlier than the less-protective surgical or cloth masks.

"It has been known for some time that all masks are not created equal," Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at Rutgers University and the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, told Patch. "N95s, when properly fitted, can reduce the transmission by more than 95 percent of the very tiny particles that are 0.3 micrometers in size, which carry the virus from one person to the next. That is the gold standard."

"On surgical masks, the pore size is bigger so more particles can go through, but since they are 2-ply, the two layers work together to trap a sizable portion of viral particles," he explained. "Cloth masks can be 1-ply and the pore sizes are bigger. They still offer some good protection, but if the exposure is very high, there will be some actual transmission."

Related: Rutgers Prof Explains The CDC's Guidance Change On Cloth Masks

The CDC updated its face covering guidance Friday, clearly stating that properly fitted N95 and KN95 masks offer the most protection against COVID-19, but it stopped short of recommending them over cloth masks.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said last week the best mask “is the one that you will wear and the one you keep on all day long, that you can tolerate in public indoor settings.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.