Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly don't think you should be ridiculed for the notion, although I think my counter thought would be why should it be one or the other, and how confident are we in the engineering side of the solution at a wide scale. To my knowledge masks are a low cost / lost risk way to reduce the spread, and countries that had faster uptake and higher rates of compliance in mask usage did see lower overall case counts. Th…
> To my knowledge masks are a low cost / lost risk way to reduce the spread, and countries that had faster uptake and higher rates of compliance in mask usage did see lower overall case counts. 1) This isn't really true. There's not a lot of correlation between what nations/states did, and where they ended up. You can find observational papers on both sides of every question (for example, specific to masks, recently:…
The short of it is that people don’t stick rigidly to the effectiveness requirement. Hence why states and countries that stop compulsion don’t see any deviation in the rate of change.
Like HCQ it works in the lab, but not in real life.
What’s disturbing is why so many people still believe they do - and why they desperately want them to work - which moves into the political and religious (“I’m pure - it’s everybody else that isn’t”) rather than the scientific.
At this stage it’s become like carrying posies to ward off the Black Death.