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And then, when they finally got around to actually applying some science to the question, the message became, "Surgical and (decent) cloth masks will protect ot

And then, when they finally got around to actually applying some science to the question, the message became, "Surgical and (decent) cloth masks will protect others from yourself, and may also protect you." I can't track down papers atm, but, on a more anecdotal level, there have been quite a few case studies of superspreader events where the people who were wearing masks were much less likely to contract the illness than people who weren't. Given the specific details at play, it's hard to explain how that could happen if cloth or surgical masks don't protect oneself as well. The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
> The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model. So close but so far. At a minimum please give https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00869-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... a read. The real story is that SARS-2 does spread through aerosols whereas droplet transmission is pure unproven dogma. The paper I linked goes into some reasons why that is the case (for ex the fact that transmission is more likely close to someone doesn’t actually provide strong evidence for droplet xmission) EDIT: I should add that even if it were primarily droplet transmission - which I very much doubt - masking would likely still fail for the stated goal (source control) in a community setting due to improper usage. And improper usage doesn't just mean "the mask is below your nose", it means "you're not changing out the mask the moment it gets damp", "you're touching your mask with unwashed hands", "you're touching your hands with unwashed mask", "you're standing closer to your conversational partner to compensate for the fact that masks muffle hearing" (<--this last one isn't "improper usage" so much as an inevitable result but I digress). And this is all without discussing any of the various negatives of mask-wearing that it's become trendy to pretend literally don't exist. But to your point, you already correctly hinted at the fact that if aerosol transmission is the dominant transmission mode, then masks don't work even in theory, let alone in practice.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

> The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model. So close but so far. At a minimum please give https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00869-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... a read. The real story is that SARS-2 does spread through aerosols whereas droplet transmission is pure unproven dogma. The paper I linked goes into some reasons why that is the case (for ex the fact that transmission is more likely close to someone doesn’t actually provide strong evidence for droplet xmission) EDIT: I should add that even if it were primarily droplet transmission - which I very much doubt - masking would likely still fail for the stated goal (source control) in a community setting due to improper usage. And improper usage doesn't just mean "the mask is below your nose", it means "you're not changing out the mask the moment it gets damp", "you're touching your mask with unwashed hands", "you're touching your hands with unwashed mask", "you're standing closer to your conversational partner to compensate for the fact that masks muffle hearing" (<--this last one isn't "improper usage" so much as an inevitable result but I digress). And this is all without discussing any of the various negatives of mask-wearing that it's become trendy to pretend literally don't exist. But to your point, you already correctly hinted at the fact that if aerosol transmission is the dominant transmission mode, then masks don't work even in theory, let alone in practice.