>Masking is somewhat effective, even the cloth masks may prevent infection in passing. It's only when sharing the same space for extended periods of time that i

>Masking is somewhat effective, even the cloth masks may prevent infection in passing. It's only when sharing the same space for extended periods of time that it becomes ineffective, and N95s and Surgical masks remain effective in such environments. KN95/N95 - yes. Surgical and cloth - very limited, especially at the population level. Large-scale masking was MAYBE effective at reducing transmission by something like 10%. This means that it wasn't stopping anything. >Before vaccines masking and lockdowns were the best things we could do to even blunt the death count, Woah woah woah. No. That is not true at all. It isn't true now, and it wasn't true then. The policy of "lockdowns" (including school closures) or "no lockdowns" wasn't the only thing on the table. It was certainly presented this way, and ANYONE who dared to question that was labeled, well ... the way you labeled Herman Cain in the next paragraph, or worse. The sad part is, we had a century of knowledge when it came to fighting respiratory pandemics .. that we threw out and just winged it based on the Chinese zero-COVID policy (even though it was clear as day that China was lying about its numbers and in hindsight their zero-COVID policy was an abject failure). We could have done targeted lockdowns at high-risk populations, and while letting the low-risk population live their lives and take appropriate measures commensurate to their risk-tolerance. Sweden was heavily criticized for that kind of policy - WHY? Florida was heavily criticized. In the end, there was no difference in outcomes when comparing lockdown regions to non-lockdown regions - comparing Florida to California. >They weren't misjudged prophets who knew something other people didn't, they were selfish people making selfish decisions who happened to be partially correct, but also made the problem worse than it had to be. They weren't prophets. They were people who had major issues with the public health policy. And even if they turned out they were wrong (and in hindsight, they weren't wrong), it was disgusting how celebrated, for example, Herman Cain's death was EVEN THOUGH he was just a victim of viral pandemic, like millions of others. Him masking would not have made a difference, just as it hasn't made a difference to 70% of the population that, regardless of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, got COVID. The rest of the population will get COVID eventually. Speaking of misguided prophets .. in July 2020, the consensus was that vaccines aren't going to be there potentially for years - so what was the end-game for lockdown policy? I remember that that time. There literally was the idea, amongst the lockdown proponents, that we could kill the pandemic by locking-down even though it was clear that was never going to happen.