I dug through to find a few of the underlying studies on the topic of masks, which is a controversial topic. I looked at three of the studies they cited that ha

I dug through to find a few of the underlying studies on the topic of masks, which is a controversial topic. I looked at three of the studies they cited that had high N numbers for enrolled patients: [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.20064899v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.20064899v... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12737864/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12737864/ [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.20064899v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.20064899v... These studies all are focused on the protective aspect of masks: does a mask prevent you from getting various coronaviruses? Also, they are all focused on health care workers who interact with sick patients. The studies find that wearing masks and taking other protective steps reduces the danger to health care workers. There is big a leap though, from the conclusions of these studies to global mask mandates. Some reasons: (1) If masks protect the individual, then individuals can make their own decisions about mask use. If you are more concerned about getting covid, you wear a mask to protect yourself. (2) Health care workers interact with a lot more sick patients than the typical person. If interact zero or just a handful of sick patients a day, your risk calculation is a lot different than if you interact with a dozen sick people each day. (3) I haven't seen any studies that look at the benefit of wearing a mask all the time as oppose to wearing a mask when you have symptoms. This would be very interesting and relevant, since it's likely that the most contagious period is when you are sick (coughing, sneezing, sinus congestion) In all, digging into the data doesn't really support global, 100% mask mandates. It does support masks to protect yourself, and mask wearing in certain situations (hospitals, for example).