[masonic]

Can you point me to any data showing that random quality cloth masks even reduce coronavirus transmission?

The recent Kaiser San Jose case[0] where one worker infected 44+ fellow staff, all of whom were wearing masks, ... from inside a tree costume would seem to be a great counterexample.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/07/kaiser-san-jose-fined...

Essentially everyone I see in the wild has been wearing masks for months, with almost perfect compliance since the Fall surge, including myself. But it seems to be mostly theater. It's like stopping BBs with a volleyball net.

It also ignores the fact that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nose or a closed mouth.

If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19 might have waned into a quiet death even without a vaccine, like SARS and MERS before it.

[joshuamorton]

> If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19

This...was stressed, significantly. Do you not remember that?

[masonic]

Look at any 20 articles about Covid transmission from February to April. You'd be lucky to find one that stressed not touching surfaces over mask wearing.

In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks... and only 8 even mentioned surfaces as a transmission vector (generally, only doorhandles).

[joshuamorton]

> In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks...

That's because surfaces aren't a major transmission vector. There was significant early concern about surface transmission, with recommendations to leave packages to quarantine for a period or wipe things with alcohol to sanitize them. There was a period where I'd wipe my phone and credit cards with alcohol everytime I reentered my house.

Pretty quickly though, the data showed that didn't matter, and so people (reasonably) stopped caring as much, instead prioritizing airborne particle transmission, which remains the main transmission vector.

[funcDropShadow]

> It also ignores the fact that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nose or a closed mouth.

Again, the primary purpose of wearing a mask is not to protect you but everybody else. By making it harder for you to spread your viruses. So, it only protects you if everybody else around you wears them.

Nevertheless, masks have a small effect on protecting with regards to viruses entering your mouth and nose, but none on your eyes, obviously.

[0-_-0]

Can you point me to a study showing the effectiveness of not touching one's face?

[jfengel]

Or parachutes?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/

[irq11]

Literally everyone thinks their favorite pseudoscientific theory is a parachute.

Calling something a parachute is not science. It’s just a pseudo-intellectual defense of superstition.