With the more contagious Omicron now the dominant Covid-19 strain, what mask to wear and how to wear it has become a contentious issue.
Professor Catherine Bennett of Melbourne's Deakin University told Daily Mail Australia in many situations how you wear the mask and how it fits can be just as important as what mask you wear.
ABC health presenter Dr Norman Swan sparked debate earlier this week by saying Australians should ditch cloth face coverings and switch to surgical or N95 masks to reduce the strain on hospitals.
'A minimum is the surgical mask and if you can get an N95 well fitting, that's the key, if it fits well around the face,' he said.
'A poorly fitting N95 wouldn't be as good as a surgical mask.'
Pictured left to right: a woman wearing an N95 mask, a woman wearing a surgical mask and a woman wearing a cloth mask
ABC health presenter Dr Norman Swan says the strain on hospitals could be helped if people wore better masks
International experts agree that N95 or P2 respirator masks are better than cloth or surgical masks as they have a higher degree of filtration and don't let airborne particles escape or be breathed in because they fit the face better.
'People might be getting messages now, as we've certainly seen in other countries where they're saying "N95 masks, everyone must have one",' Professor Bennett, chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, said.
'But the important thing is, there are certain situations where that is good advice, but equally, if we have the masks we already have and we wear them well, we turn over our reusable masks, we fit them to our face better than we probably are now, all of that will help as well.'
Dr Bennett said that in the two years of the pandemic, we've learnt a lot more about masks and how people wear them and also how poorly people wear them.
'A mask is really only as good as the way people manage their mask - how regularly they change them, how well they fit them to their face when they're wearing them and how they store them if it's a reusable mask,' she said.
Dr Bennett also has a message for those who refuse to pull their mask over their nose.
'Anything that you're wearing on your face that's hanging down below your nose is not going to work, it doesn't matter what (type of mask) it is.'
