Thanks for reaching out and sorry to hear that you want to close your account. Let us help you sort this out.

Upon checking, we pulled up a free account linked to this email address.

That said, we recommend that you close your account completely by following these steps. (This link goes to the page at the top of this OP.)

Please note that when an account is closed, we’ll delete or anonymize your personal data so it no longer identifies you, except for data we are legally allowed or required to maintain, such as for tax and accounting purposes, unresolved disputes, and security or fraud prevention.

That should cover everything. If you have other questions, feel free to write back to us.

Until then,

(name)

Spotify Customer Support

Florida, where I’ve spent the winter holidays, is now a severe-looking blackish purple on coronavirus-case-rate maps. I’ll probably get COVID any minute now, because my fellow revelers seem not overly concerned about keeping their excretions to themselves. The other day, one young man turned his head to the side and hocked a loogie into the sand a few feet away from me. Another took a big inhale from the hookah he had brought to the beach, then puffed a cloud of apple-scented lung aerosols into the South Florida sky and, as it happens, into my nostrils as well. Indoors, I am one of the few people who wears a mask at all.

Earlier in the pandemic, this would have terrified me because, as the 2020-era mantra went, “my mask protects you, and your mask protects me.” In the Sunshine State, though, “your mask” is often nonexistent. But some researchers now think that catchphrase needs an update. Though universal masking is still safest, my mask protects me too. And wearing a good-quality mask while vaccinated and boosted (which I am) protects me pretty darn well, regardless of what everyone else is doing.

If you are vaccinated, boosted, and wearing a well-fitted N95 or similar indoors, “your risk is extremely low,” says Joseph Allen, a COVID and ventilation expert at Harvard. “I mean, there’s not much else in life that would have as low a risk as that. I would qualify your risk as de minimis.” An N95 mask filters about 95 percent of airborne particles. But two surgical masks—one on me, one on you—filter only about 91 percent, Allen wrote recently for The Washington Post. Because most people’s masks aren’t perfectly sealed onto their faces, studies show that N95s reduce the wearer’s uptake of coronavirus particles by 57 to 86 percent. And that’s on top of the protection that vaccines and boosters already offer.

Ideally, everyone would wear masks indoors for the next few weeks. That’s not going to happen, though. The good news is that if you’re boosted and wear a high-quality mask, you’ll probably be okay anyway. Some experts even think people who are triple-vaccinated and wearing N95s can go about their normal activities. “They should feel pretty safe because the booster provides strong protection against severe outcomes, and even if infected people are present and releasing viruses into the air, a properly fitting N95 will reduce the amount you breathe in by 95 percent or more,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech who specializes in airborne transmission. “The combination of vaccination with [a] booster and an N95 provides excellent protection.”

The caveat is that your mask has to fit well, and it has to be an N95 or similar—cloth masks offer scant protection against Omicron. “Well fitting” means you shouldn’t have any air leakage out of the sides of the mask, near the nose, or by the chin. If you wear glasses, they shouldn’t fog up. “If you breathe in, the face piece should collapse inward just a little bit,” says Lisa Brosseau, a consultant and an expert on industrial hygiene. “If you breathe outward, you should get a little bit of expansion of the face piece.”

Throughout the pandemic, wearing a face mask has been one of the best ways that anyone can easily reduce their risk of catching or spreading COVID-19. Putting aside the often contentious debate over mask mandates, face masks remain a crucial and effective individual tool, which is why it continues to be frustrating that most people, two years in, are not wearing better masks.

-- SNIP --

One of the most vocal advocates for the use of higher-quality masks throughout the pandemic has been Stanford infectious-diseases doctor Abraar Karan, who has researched COVID transmission and been calling for the use of high-filtration masks since the spring of 2020. His Twitter feed continues to be an invaluable resource for information on mask effectiveness, criticism of the inadequate public-health efforts regarding masking, and other commentary on COVID-19. I spoke with Dr. Karan about his ongoing campaign for better masks, their importance in the fight against Omicron, and why you should replace that cloth mask in your underwear drawer.

Why should people start using high-filtration masks like N95s and KN95s as their go-to, everyday masks rather than cloth ones?
The key reason is that transmission of the coronavirus is primarily through aerosols, which float around in the air — you inhale them — and are not filtered well by cloth masks. You really need melt-blown polypropylene, which you find in surgical masks and N95s, to stop these small particles.

So the materials used to make these masks make them better equipped to filter out the virus?
Yeah. The material is basically melt-blown polymers, like polypropylene, which form this complex sort of webbing which is then electrostatically charged, and that pulls the particles in when you’re inhaling and exhaling. Cloth masks are often just woven thread and other materials that don’t have that design. Cloth masks don’t provide great source control, either. The CDC is now letting people who test positive for COVID-19 stop isolating after five days and then wear a mask for five days. It would have been ideal for them to also recommend that be a better mask.