> the effectiveness of its protective effect is reduced.

How did you jumped from "reduced" to "completely useless".

> Are you really going to change your surgical mask every 3 minutes to make it effective against getting infected?

My typical situation is not surgical situation.

You obviously don't get it how a virus survives outside body. It survives because it is inside a wet biological droplet; breathing through a surgical mask would make the area around intake wet with some human cells, making it a wonderful spot for survival of viruses; it basically makes it a prime collector surface. The mask itself is permeable and whatever viruses are collected on the outer layer thrive there unless the surface was strongly antiseptic (hint: it isn't). To be safe, you'd have to change it pretty often; surgeons moreover don't touch their masks while they are performing a surgery, you probably wouldn't have such limitations. "I have seen such a mask in a Hollywood movie, that means it must work."

COVID-19 family is also pretty agile:

"The analysis of 22 studies reveals that human coronaviruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus or endemic human coronaviruses (HCoV) can persist on inanimate surfaces like metal, glass or plastic for up to 9 days."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...

Good luck relying on the safety from wearing surgical masks! /s

Aaaaand there is adjacent recommendation to boil them.

Aaaand you wear them also to not make sick others by spreading your virus as far as you breathe.

Do surgeons change their surgical masks every 3 minutes while performing surgery? And the operative word the doctor used is "reduced" effectiveness, not "eliminated" effectiveness.

Surgeons wear it so that their breath/mouth droplets don't end up in patient's intenstines while performing a surgery, causing an infection. For that purpose a single surgical mask can last hours (i.e. it keeps droplets on the inner surface of the mask). If they have to perform surgery on highly dangerous patients, they use hazmat suits instead:

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9bd2e88c4296be54e7f845...