Wearing a grocery bag instead of a condom will likely also reduce your risk of unwanted pregnancy, that doesn't translate into being effectively protective. Ma

Wearing a grocery bag instead of a condom will likely also reduce your risk of unwanted pregnancy, that doesn't translate into being effectively protective. Masks help lower droplets and aerosol in the air from your breath. So they slow the contagion. But they do not stop it, if the average person were likely to contract a contagion within 6 months with normal behavior and a mask reduces transmissibility by 50%, this just means the average person is now likely to contract it within a year. It slows the spread. It does not reduce your risk of contracting the virus over your lifetime. And if you have comorbidities and are at risk, you are just as likely to die when you get it 1 year from now or 6 months from now. Masks did give us more time to develop a vaccine. So in the end they helped society. But they do not protect you. The only ways to protect yourself are a vaccine, social isolation until the contagion is eradicated, or hermetically sealing yourself in a plastic bodysuit every time you are in close proximity to other people. A lot of people confuse these two concepts (managing a population vs managing individuals) and think that they apply to and correlate directly with one another. They do not. It is the same counterintuitive mistake as misunderstanding test accuracy and false positive rate. This is the only point I was trying to make. CDC guidelines are not designed to protect you in a pandemic, they're designed to manage a population.