The WHO recently changed its guidance to recommend masks for all, albeit only in "specific situations" where distancing is not possible.

WHO has updated its guidance to advise that to prevent COVID-19 transmission effectively in areas of community transmission, governments should encourage the general public to wear masks in specific situations and settings as part of a comprehensive approach to suppress SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

Lets just say every one is just as clueless about this virus as WHO or CDC or Fauci or whoever. Its just a failure of our not so advanced research in this field that we are in this situation. I can't believe everyone is just so clueless.

You are blatantly wrong. There are of course many things we don't understand about the new virus yet, but of course the experts on infectious diseases know a lot more than the average person. Why is is such a common trope to discredit whole fields of research just because they can't provide all the answers, or gasp revise their answers as more data comes in?

Your suggestion that there is any kind of scientific consensus at this point is wrong; the experts are still very much divided. And right now the most prominent and most frequently cited experts are those that made one wrong prediction after another.

Sometimes the media cites the wrong experts. Like with "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction" and "Hillary has a 99% chance of winning the general". In those cases, too, the experts that disagreed with the mainstream view got basically ignored until it was too late.

Whether a non-medical mask protects the wearer is still up for debate. But the fact that they help protect others from droplet dispersion is elementary physics.

If the debate about mask usage is still going on, what does that tell you about the science on respiratory diseases? The absence of consensus on elementary physics is an embarrassment.

Sure, experts do know a lot more about the virus than an average person.

But, AFAIK, experts don't really have answers to these questions:

- How long does the immunity last?

- How much do asymptomatic people transmit?

- How much do pre-symptomatic people transmit?

- Related to the previous two questions, what percent of cases got infected from symptomatic people?

- What percent of cases got infected from contaminated surfaces, what percent -- from aerosols, what percent -- from droplets?

To a non-expert like me the questions above sound super essential. It's been more than half a year since the virus spread began. How come we still don't know? And so, while calling experts clueless is not polite, does it sound like such a stretch? Maybe it's OK, if experts actually admit they have no clue at the moment?

"... revise their answers as more data comes in?"

This should be a totally normal thing to do, I agree.

> This study did not aim to verify whether surgical or cloth masks are able to shorten the trajectory of droplets emitted through coughing.

This seems like a very limited study, since so much of the discussion about masks as a way of preventing spread has resolved around the known cases of one person spreading the virus to a big crowd of others in a confined indoor space.

These attempts to frame masks as emotional or fear are very manipulative. Please argue by facts instead of emotional appeals to peoples insecurity.