Edit: before you downvote this, read it? I'm not an anti-vax nutcase. They didn't trust the public with their actual thinking at any point during Covid. The guidance was initially "don't wear a mask, it will make it worse because you'll infect yourself with your hand" to "we'll just lock down for 3 weeks and then back to normal" to "we have to flatten the curve to avoid overwhelming hospitals" to the current policy o…
Surgical masks (and other cloth masks) make a small but significant difference in transmission. At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn't understand whether that difference was lost in the increased need to interact with one's face while wearing a mask (and we now know that SARS-CoV-2 becomes inactivated quite quickly on surfaces, like our hands). N95s and higher rated masks/filters have always been very good for v…
if the message were inverted—wear masks at home, around friends, and in social situations rather than in public—perhaps masks might have made a bit of a difference. but that wasn’t the message, and as a result masks haven’t made much difference at all (other than the ulterior purpose of instilling fear and control). most of the effect attributed to masking was a misattribution away from simple distancing.