It would be nice to have some numbers to back this up. Lets suppose the "viral load" to acquire a Covid infection is 18 particles, the same as norovirus detailed in the article. And let's say you're exposed to hundreds of thousands of viral particles every minute you spend near a sick person [1]. If a mask reduces your viral load by 50%, is that a worthwile method of avoiding infection? It is not.
Our simulation also shows that wearing a mask can effectively reduce the spread of the viruses.
Another metric is, will that stop you from getting sick? The threshhold is only 18 particles!
Given that, there will always be a border at which having an additional 50% coverage is useful. Where the actual line is, we don't know. But as long as protection is monotonic in the factors above, it's always valuable to have more protection, which implies even <100% effective masks are useful.
Trivial proof: Imagine someone with literally 10k masks all around them. You have to admit this is more safe than 1 mask. QED. You can call in meta factors like "in reality nothing matters" but you're arguing by consequences then, not actually disagreeing with the facts, just claiming they don't matter.
The issue with masks is one side started treating them like a talisman that makes infection impossible, which provoked the other side to say they do nothing.
On a population level, masks are probably close to ineffective against a viral pathogen. You can read the relevant Cochrane review to see that.
On an individual level they obviously do something, but you have to consider other factors as well, such as level/frequency of exposure and the like. Studies from prior to the pandemic suggested that a perfectly fitted N95 mask dramatically reduced flu virus penetration. For a more normally worn N95 the reduction was about 70%. For a surgical mask it was essentially nil. Importantly, a perfectly fitted mask required essentially gluing it to the face of a mannequin.
Final point is, with an intervention whose impact is measurable but imperfect, you have to consider the side effects. I personally know several friends of my teenage kids who now have odd (to me at least) social phobias for which the only “cure” is to wear masks everywhere. Just last weekend I was talking to a friend of my daughter who wears masks everywhere except indoors.
From Cochrane.org:
Statement on 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce ... - Cochrane
Mar 10, 2023
Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation. It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive.
Repeating the important part:
the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses
Conversely, here’s a good study that shows that consistent use of FFP3 respirator masks drastically reduced transmission among workers on a hospital ward: https://elifesciences.org/articles/71131
Note that the study only had the workers wearing FFP3 masks on shifts, and community transmission was high at the time. Therefore the study “leaked” and good masks work better than the numbers in the study might seem to indicate. Face-fitting masks do work, and very well. Of course they do. It’s all very clear if you dig into the aerosol physics.
A mask mandate that permits "wrap a piece of T-shirt over your mouth, some of the time, sometimes even covering your nose" (which is not far from what I saw for much of 2020) is, unsurprisingly, going to be more effective at ensuring grudging compliance with a mandate than it is to reduce the spread of an airborne virus.
Close family is at risk of severe illness or death from COVID. We provide for a small child. We do not have much margin.
I’d like to ask you to imagine the social repercussions of masking. It’s hard. I do not want to be weird. I do not want to be an outcast, practically speaking. I don’t want to wear a mask.
I just don’t have any margin in the other direction.
Also:
What is it about a hospital setting that makes a given type of mask more effective?
Answer: Nothing.
Hospitals are places where it’s easier to run a trial, and where it’s harder to avoid infection.
Face-fitting masks do not require glue. Fitting a mask isn’t that hard.
Cloth masks don’t work and never did.
The objective is to not die or be maimed by a virulent pathogen, or rather: to have the option. Clarity on effective means for those who want it. I want effective means because I need them. The objective is not social classification of mask wearers or categorization of discussion types or labeling people as cartoons.
The objective is clear information as input into serious personal decision-making. The guy on the subway is not in scope.
In terms of being weird: there are enough people wearing masks and most people literally care more about what they're going to have for dinner than whether or not you're wearing a mask. If a mask helps your family, don't worry about the epsilon weird aspect (as I'm sure you have already calculated).
I think I can also pretty decisively say that hospital purchasing optimizations give face-fitting masks a bad rap. The FFP2 masks that hospital staff wear here are cheap and very uncomfortable. This bleeds into society as a negative view.
I know my comment will just make you angry, because "you're different". But, maybe someone else will see it and consider their psychological state on this topic.
I wish for your life to be long and healthy; and the lives of your loved ones too. And in that, let me give you advice to trade for your judgement of my place in life and my actions and sacrifices and loss. The advice is this:
Read. The academic. Literature.
So what can you say? You see a stranger wearing a mask, you don't know if it's for a good reason or not. Probably the odds are that it's an emotional or psychological hangup, but it may be for a really good reason. So you need to just shrug and let people do what they think best for themselves. They're the ones responsible for themselves.
And the criticism of the Cochrane-method review.
And the studies not cited.
As well as the studies on the mechanics of transmission.
Is the surgeon wearing a mask to protect himself from me, or to protect me from him?
This article is factually accurate: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
Surgeons wear masks to protect the patient, because masks are very effective at trapping both droplets and aerosols that are emitted from the wearer. They are not designed to protect the user from lingering aerosols as masks are too loose to form a good seal, so most air breathed in simply enters from around the sides of the mask.
The idea that ballistic droplets are the primary means of infection is the old, old misunderstanding.
If we compare the objective of preventing transmission of pathogens from surgeon to patient to the objective of covering nudity, surgical masks are as effective as shorts.
Seeing as the objective is the objective, the ends should define the means. Therefore it is clear that any use of surgical masks is a fundamental and entrenched misunderstanding.
Surgical masks reduce outward aerosol-sized particles by at least 74%: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7
Surgical masks reduce outward COVID viral transmission by 73%, and viral RNA by 58%: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00637-20
Outward filtering efficiency above 50% is certainly worth it compared to the cost of a surgeon wearing a mask. It's arguably worth it even at much lower efficiencies.
If you read my comment, you'll notice I'm not disagreeing on the aerosol/droplet size boundary. I'm arguing against the apparent subtext of your comment, which seems to indicate that surgical masks aren't effective at protecting patients.
I’d like to reiterate my analogy of the shorts :)
Not least due to the subtle knock-on effects: surgical masks cast a fog on public awareness of face-fitting masks, which are superior in all respects (including comfort, which – case in point – came as a surprise when I tried one).
—
The effectiveness of face-fitting masks is so much greater that I honestly regard the use of surgical masks as morally indefensible.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/27/dont-b...
The review concludes that we have evidence that masks are effective, but the set of papers reviewed cannot be used to conclude we know the level of effectiveness enough to make accurate judgements on tradeoffs in many of the kinds of situations where people were asked to wear masks in the pandemic. So we don't know enough yet.
I read a bunch of the criticisms of this paper and criticism of the anti-maskers misrepresentation of what it said, and none of the ones I found suggested that there were missed papers which provide the precision the review didn't find.
The Guardian article is a mixed bag in my opinion. It tries to get around the idea that we really need more research, it confuses a lot of things.
(BTW, I am not an anti masker, I wore a mask, I find people who whine about wearing them to be a bit pathetic most of the time.)
This somewhat excuses their reactionary stupidity. Like they weren't "provoked", the use of masks wasn't directed at them.
Here there was never an outdoor mask policy, so I didn't ever have a chance to evaluate my reaction to such a thing. There was apparently a policy banning stores like Walmart from selling seeds (which I interpreted as bureaucratic friction rather than intention, something that was born out relatively quickly in practice, and never in the minds of the reactionaries).
You can do some reading about the Bay Area and debates over whether government policies are in bad faith. I think it’s at least arguable that some are in fact in bad faith (meaning, no one really thinks they’ll serve any public purpose other than punishing groups of people).
The policy, not the global, some times lethal, pandemic.
The policy made people not want you near them.
My belief is that they were collectively responding to an uncertain, rapidly changing situation, were incentivized to be very conservative given the early experience in Italy, didn't adjust their approach sufficiently when new information revised the case fatality rate downward, and did a poor job overall of balancing the broad spectrum of risks and costs. I don't think any of these mistakes were intentional. And none of us, including those who criticize these policies in hindsight, really know what would have happened had the policies been more lax, especially early on.
There we are in perfect agreement.
That policy is also obviously at odds with scientific knowledge.
Policies like that harm high-risks groups immensely too.
Over here, the bad policies were strict social restrictions. Baseless and arbitrary restrictions of the number of people allowed to be at funerals and strict and severe limits to hospital visits. None of these were necessary from the perspective of the reality of aerosolized transmission and how easy it is to strip the pathogen out of the air we breathe.
It’s so absurd that it took a long time to find an analogy. It’s like repairing the flat tire on your bike with a patch of sod. It doesn’t really work, it’s messy, and people will think you’re crazy.
This is an oddly biased framing.
However there are statistics that areas with more masking had less severe illness. However that’s uncontrolled and some other factors or factors might account for both increased masking and reduced spread. That’s probably the case otherwise the RCTs would show efficacy.
All of the subsequent work is just computer models and doesn’t actually tell us anything empirical. Obviously it’s easier to create a model that produces the desired result than it is an RCT.
Science is an on going process, always open to being overturned.
To the point of masks - I agree with your statement here, but a regular mask (filtered masks should help to some extent) will not protect you from an infected person. An infected person with a mask will reduce the chance of spreading their viral load.
This detail is where I feel people are talking past eachother. Most of covid denial to me seems to be about a psychological reactance to being told to mask up when they are not sick.
One might argue that the extra chance of reduced vectorization is worth mask mandates, but that simplistic purely “scientific” approach is its own problem. You have to argue people where they are at and convince them, not force the “right” view on them and then get upset they are “in denial” or skeptical.
Or do you just mean universal requirements imposed by society at large when you say 'any'?
^ and the more you have it the less severe it is, until it asymptotically reaches a complete non-issue. As with the common cold.
I just don't get the rejection of basic facts.
Which is to say you shouldn't be terribly surprised that there is a general strain of "don't tread on me" in the discourse. Simply being told what to do is enough to elicit a strong negative response.
Infection is binary or not. You either get exposed to enough to actually result in replication inside your body or you don't. If you get exposed to a small amount and your immune system immediately eliminates it, that's not an infection.
The amount of exposure needed to actually cause an infection is different from person to person depending on their immediate immune response.
But it's not like reducing exposure by 50% reduces disease severity by 50%. Biology doesn't work that way.
edit: Imagine this being controversial. I didn't realize there were Covid deniers and skeptics here, because what I've stated is completely within established science.