The World Health Organization recommends the use of respiratory protective equipment, in this context masks, as a way to alleviate the severe acute respiratory infection disease pandemic COVID19 (SARS-CoV-2). This recommendation was made to the general population, not just health professionals or people who are in direct contact with the sick. Generally speaking, there was a lot of publicity for the use of masks, but there was no disclosure of what would be the most important requirements to be considered for the choice. In this context, the objective of this work was to verify the understanding of the community in general about what are the important requirements in choosing a protective mask against pathogens. For this, an analysis was carried out in 200 scientific articles where it was possible to obtain five keywords related to the most important requirements when choosing a mask, namely: comfort, safety, cost, reuse and facial adjustment. An opinion poll was carried out in 4 groups, in which a weighting was requested for each keyword. The first group is composed of five health professionals and five teachers, the second of five students and people randomly chosen from the community. The objective is to study the influential criteria for the choice of respiratory protection equipment using the mathematical method Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to demonstrate the influence relationship between the criteria. As a result, it was found that the group of professionals considers criteria related to safety and the group of non-professionals considers factors related to cost and reuse, and this demonstrates a higher risk of infection.