Among other things, vaccinated persons can and do contract, carry, and spread, during which a decent* mask does do its thing.
And who doesn’t wear an N95 class mask? I see about 2/3rds N95, KN95, or KF94s, 1/3 useless masks, appearing to be mostly correlated along economic lines ($2/masks vs. $0.50/masks).
PS. This is bigger than “fractions of a percent”:
https://jdrampage.org/real-world-covid-mask-trial-proves-mas...
* This shows lame mask are lame:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32512240/
Put those two concepts together, you get humdinger models suggesting:
“… if only around half of the population opted to wear respirator-type masks from the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 would have failed to establish in the United States.”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.210699
(Would have needed closer to 2/3 with those sneeze guard ’surgical’ masks.)
I can't comment on the rest of the science, but fwiw, I live in NYC and I'd estimate that maybe 1 / 20 people I see on the street are wearing N95/KN95/KF94 masks. Everyone else just wears cloth masks, or paper surgical masks.
TBC, I’d agree that your point, that of the article you shared, is valid. But it doesn’t pertain to the claims of inefficacy of masks outside a lab.
No, it isn't. If you'd bothered to read the content of the link I posted in the comment to which you're replying, you'd see that it's about the same paper.
That paper is mentioned numerous times in the thread you're commenting on, I've linked to it, as have others, and I've cited the absolute effect size: 0.09%.
The paper showed that there was an 11% drop on a baseline infection rate of 0.79%, in a fully unvaccinated population with very little natural immunity. It is the absolute best possible argument for masks, and it showed that cloth masks had no detectible effect, and that surgical masks had an effect size measured in tiny fractions of a percent.
2) You're right that Americans are idiots who mostly can't tell the difference between a piece of cloth, which reduces viral loads marginally, and a proper mask.
3) Vaccinations have minimal impact on spread for extended in-door socialization (~30% reduction in odds of spread at this point). They do pretty well for reducing risk to you (e.g. death or hospitalization), and they seem to do pretty well for avoiding casual spread (e.g. passing someone on the street).
Also, last time I checked, most people aren't wearing N95 masks. Probably because they're annoying and difficult to wear.
> Which isn't minor. It's been over a year. If you're not using an N95, you're doing yourself and those around you a disservice.
I am vaccinated. Which brings up an important point: there is absolutely no evidence that a mask of any sort provides any benefit to those around me, a vaccinated person.
At some point, you have to put up evidence for your increasingly implausible claims -- you can't just keep leaning on lab studies of filtration efficiency. It's been two years now. Where is the real-world data backing your claims?