if statement handlebars with passed 2 values - node.js

Question

I'm making a site with handlebars and nodejs and I want to show a "message" (you can best compare them to tweets) only if the "message" is from a specific user.
For the if statement I used the following question asked on stackoverflow in the past: Logical operator in a handlebars.js {{#if}} conditional I'm passing through 2 variables: messages and username where username is a string and messages an array. I use message as |item| to get a specific place from the array. The username is stored in item.[0]. As I change the username in the value to "test" in line 3 of the hbs code so it would be {{#ifCond item.[0] "test"}} then it works, but not with the username passed through with the value.
Here's my handlebars code:
{{#if user}}
{{#each messages as |item|}}
{{#ifCond item.[0] username}}
<div class="card" style="width: 100%;">
<div class="card-body">
<h5 class="cardtitle">{{#key}}</h5>
<h6 class="card-subtitle mb-2 text-muted">{{item.[0]}}</h6>
<h6 class="card-subtitle mb-2 text-muted">{{item.[2]}}</h6>
<p class="card-text">{{item.[1]}}</p>
</div>
</div>
<p></p>
{{else}}
<p>{{item.[0]}}</p>
{{/ifCond}}
{{/each}}
{{/if}}
The node.js code to load the page:
router.get('/users',loggedIn,messages,(req, res) => {
var user = res.user
var username = req.query.user
var message = res.message
if (user != undefined){
res.render("publicprofile", {user:user, username:username, messages:message, usernamestr:String(username)})
} else{
res.redirect("/")
}
});
and the handlebars helper:
hbs.registerHelper('ifCond', function(v1, v2, options) {
if(v1 === v2) {
return options.fn(this);
}
return options.inverse(this);
});