It doesn't have to personally protect you at high effectiveness from getting infected to reduce spread at a population level.

Even a 50% reduction in spread is huge in a population. Maybe we aren't getting that with masks, but it's not a binary "you are protected"/"you are not protected" problem.

>Needless to say, masking is political hot button beyond anything I've ever seen in public health.

At the same time i think we've all done a disservice to the public.

When you actually look at face cloth coverings, they actually only have very limited impact in reducing the amount of virus that you inhale in or exhale out.

Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.

I've been really disappointed with my colleagues in public health for not being more clear about what can masking can do or not do.

On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.

The bottom line though is by telling people that in fact just putting a face cloth covering on is going to protect you is simply not true.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

Cloth masks are nowhere near good enough protection to allow children too young to be vaccinated to return to school.

I'm just asking if we have info on population spread effects for masks / no masks.

"Masks won't protect you" isn't an answer to that question. I don't wear a mask when requested by local guidelines or businesses as some kind of guarantee that I don't get COVID.

And yes, having kids not all go to school and then return to their families on a daily basis would probably have a much bigger affect on community spread. But if we can't get political will for masks or vaccinations then I don't know where we're going to find it for another round of kids staying home.

The answer to the question is that cloth masks are effective against viruses with a droplet based spread, but not against a fully airborne virus.

Note that cloth masks almost completely did away with last year's Flu season, while we were right in the middle of a huge Covid surge.

NEW YORK (AP) — February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.

Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

https://apnews.com/article/flu-has-disappeared-us-pandemic-2...

https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/zero-f...

A 50% reduction and we still all get covid. It is actually binary -- either we have a realistic and obtainable plan for zero-covid (which we do not) or everyone gets exposed to covid eventually.

A 50% reduction in spread might be helpful in certain areas where the hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed (in which case just close the schools for a few weeks), but in the United States there are a lot of mask mandates in schools being pushed in areas where the hospitals are not under any significant pressure. That is nonsense.

Sure in an ideal world as soon as hospitalizations or case rates went above some metric we'd introduce stricter local procedures, hopefully fast enough that the wave of hospitalizations 1-2 weeks later isn't too bad.

But so far it seems like we're too slow on that. Things get bad, then we start changing our behavior. Time matters and it's not binary. That's been the whole principle of managing this thing in the US at the beginning. If you let the spike get too big too quickly then it gets bad before we can take corrective action.

And how would we even manage changing these guidelines on a week-by-week basis in every zip code? How do you even disseminate that information to all businesses, citizens, parents?

Of course I don't think all restrictions make sense in all places, nor do I want them to go on forever. Vaccinations for a large majority of eligible individuals would go a long way to reducing spread and hospitalization load.

In theory we are trying to bide time until we get there (manageable COVID, not zero COVID) but in the US at least we're not heading towards "large majority" very quickly, and we are still having those exponential local spikes.

Probably pretty close to zero when we’re talking about being in a classroom with 30 other kids for a few hours. The mask protects against things going straight ahead, not against slowly filling up a room with aerosols.

I guess masking up might mean everyone gets slowly infected over the course of days though (through aerosols), instead of getting a full dose of virus straight in the face. I presume that affects the severity of the subsequent disease.

I appreciate the simplicity of the message to mask up, since it’s almost certainly better than nothing, but it’s no panacea.