[nnq]

Using a mask like you described still helps significantly. (Would help 10x more if the user would put it in a damn plastic bag, not on the table!). If you wear the mask on crowded bus or subway and take it off when you enter a not-so-crowded-and-frequented caffe you still did a lot!

What would help a lot would be smth. like a high-power-UV portable box that could fit in a backpack (or a chemical equivalent), to allow at least some imperfect but useful re-sterilizing of masks... single-use N95s are hugely wasteful...

I think our current focus on "perfect" and "100% correct" (whatever that even means...) hurts managing pandemics A TON! An approach where we'd recognize the probabilistic nature of contagion and fight for +1% probability of desired-event-X1, -0.1% prob. of undesired-event-X2 etc. would be much useful... at whole-population scales all measures will be sloppily implemented in practice and we need to accept than and just "tweak the odds" until "we're mostly winning"...

(For sure, use better proven and standardized methods in hospitals and other settings with well trained people paid to implement measures correctly. But don't expect most of the average population to bother doing things the optimal way even when they've been educated about it... there's opportunity costs to everything, even to "giving a f"!)