[kgarten]

Wearing a mask is a medical intervention for you??

wearing a mask is not about protecting you, it's protecting other people. If you don't value other people's lives, don't wear one it won't help you personally.

Ok ... so where is the evidence that they don't work?

Current scientific consensus is on my side of the debate:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8

If you know better, do the experiments and the analysis, get it peer-reviewed and we can talk again.

If you are ok with the consequences that you might kill people, don't wear a mask. Fine with me. Just don't tell anybody afterwards that you didn't know and that it was just a guess.

i feel this discussion as tedious as the discussion about vaccinations: https://twitter.com/nathanTbernard/status/142511666690879488...

People are no mannequins ... people die.

[timr]

> Ok ... so where is the evidence that they don't work?

I provided you with the link to the WHO meta-analysis of all research literature surrounding masks prior to the pandemic. Here it is again:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

This covers 172 publications on masks and disease leading up to the pandemic. It is far more comprehensive than any particular paper or editorial you cherry-pick to support your arguments.

The best you can possibly say is that there is poor evidence supporting a small marginal effect. And that's if you combine all of the data in an illogical way and ignore that cloth masks and respirators are not the same, and that n95 masks in hospitals are not at all the same as bandanas in the subway. If you limit the argument to the question of non-respirator masks outside hospitals, there's no supporting evidence at all.

Spamming the comments with links to the same two papers from 2020 -- neither of which are good (see my other response) -- is not a rebuttal. The only high-quality paper on masks in 2020 was the Danish mask study, which was a well-controlled, high-quality RCT, and failed to find evidence for a protective effect:

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

Despite exasperating claims to the contrary, it is unlikely to be true that masks are magical one-way valves, with protective effect in one direction but not the other -- particularly if the virus is spread by aerosols, which are not blocked by poorly fitting masks.

[kgarten]

Your lancet study with 172 publications comes to this conclusion:

"These data also suggest that wearing face masks protects people (both health-care workers and the general public) against infection by these coronaviruses."

Again, were is evidence that they don't work?

For example if cloth masks would not block around 40% in contorlled experiments: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20

Masks are not the magic one thing. Yet, it's one of the measures that helps. Don't put too much trust in masks, add social distancing and other preventive measures.

Yet, I don't see what the rational behind "they don't work" is. They lower the risk of getting infected and more important to infect others (anything in front of your mouth will do as it stops droplets ... basic physics. how much it does it that's debatable.

If I have a very wet speaking language, and am infected with COVID. You tell me I'm infecting the same amount of people if I wear a mask as if I would not wear one? (given the rest is the same??). Sorry, my understanding of physics does not agree with you. Not even going for virology or other topics.

Do you have a novel particle model we can use that explains your assumptions? You should test it in a lab.