[s1artibartfast]

it not really a ten paragraph statement:

Masks work, but healthcare workers need them more.

I think a seperate and perfectly valid question is if public consumption of masks has had any impact on the health supply chain.

My understanding is the two are unrelated. Masks are had to come by because manufacturers are selling their entire capacity to hospital and consumer stores are not being restocked. The state and the fed (in the US) have tens of millions of masks, and are releasing some but not all of them to the hospitals.

Hospitals are not competing for the masks at hardware stores or amazon.

If anything, I wish the media would urge people to wear masks with lower ratings than N95.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Catching even half particulate when an infected person coughs would be huge.

[shalmanese]

Because then they would have to say the unsaid part which is "Masks work but we failed to adequately prepare so we need to ration them severely."

Every country that's managed to bend the R0 curve has had masks as an integral part of their strategy and that's only been possible because masks were made a deliberate part of their public health strategy for over a decade (mostly due to SARS). It's only one leg of the stool as Japan is finding out as one of the few mask-wearing countries that's not getting it under control but a stool with one leg missing is a pretty useless stool!

Western countries are paying the price for a decade of staring on and going "those kooky Asians with their strange mask wearing practices".