One of the largest peer-reviewed European studies says...
"These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage."
https://www.cureus.com/articles/93826-correlation-between-ma...
Why? Because they are ineffective and were only introduced as a way to busy or "pacify" the masses.
I believe that is what pre-COVID masking in hospital settings has shown, yes. Possibly COVID is different from the flu.
But the difficulty for proving masking helps is:
1. If it only takes ~20 virions to get infected, then masking has to have a basically perfect filtering rate and be worn perfectly 100% of the time, neither of which is obvious.
2. With an endemic virus even if masks slow down spread they aren't going to reduce your likelihood of being infected overall.
> Consistent use of a face mask or respirator in indoor public settings was associated with lower odds of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result (adjusted odds ratio = 0.44). Use of respirators with higher filtration capacity was associated with the most protection, compared with no mask use.
I'll take a reduced risk, even if it's not perfect. Would you prefer to get covid one time, or five times? It's like arguing "why bother wearing a seatbelt, when it doesn't prevent injuries in accidents?"
Also, are you suggesting masking does not help with preventing influenza infection?
How did they account for people "doing something different" when wearing a mask? I.e. did they do a double-blind experiment where people wore masks that had intentional holes in them? So we can know that wearing a mask is the thing to do vs whatever it is that wearing a mask caused that person to do. I guess I'm asking or saying that this might have been some sort of "correlation is not causation" kind of thing?
I get that for whatever reason folks like yourself don't want to believe it, but trust me, masks work. Just ask anyone who works in asbestos abatement or BSL-2+ facilities.
Here is a great starting point from 2021. https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask...
They are a failure. Globally. https://www.amazon.com/Unmasked-Global-Failure-COVID-Mandate...
One of the largest peer-reviewed European studies says... "These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage." https://www.cureus.com/articles/93826-correlation-between-ma...
Why? Because they are ineffective and were only introduced as a way to busy or "pacify" the masses.