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Comment by Tagbert | Hacker News Reader

Flu transmission and Covid transmission are not identical. Covid seems to be mainly transmitted by relatively large respiratory droplets. The expiration and transmission of those droplets is greatly reduced by a mask, even if some leakage occurs around the edges. Perhaps because the drops are more likely to just drop as a result.

Most of the studies have been done in high risk, high exposure situations. The high concentration and repeated exposure over extended periods of time greatly increase the chance of infection. This does not reflect the lower concentrations and shorter duration of most civilian exposures. It generally takes more than a single virus to actually result in infection.

Since there are indications that wearing masks does give you some protection and does give significant protection to those around you, why not accept the minor inconvenience and wear one?

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"Since there are indications that wearing masks does give you some protection and does give significant protection to those around you..."

This is precisely what I'm trying to find evidence of. So far, I've clicked through to one summary of the research, followed by three papers linked in there, which supposedly support the claim, and found that there is almost no support for those claims.

And as I already said above, I do wear one.

Edited to add: Also, I've been reading more and more articles questioning the claim that Coronavirus is mostly limited to the larger droplets.

"There is no benefit and there may even be negative impact."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8583925/The-land-no...

Not remotely surprising. The fake masks are basically dirty sponges stuck in the most important air stream.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24045096

You're right, from an evidence-based medicine perspective there is little to no proof that masks work, and some indication that they are counter-productive. There are plenty of people posting links with dozens of papers claiming to prove that they do work, but very few if any of those people seem to have actually read anything on those lists, as none of them claim what the people posting the links claim they claim. (note that I'm not claiming here people should or should not wear them, this is a position-neutral meta observation).

That said, at this point wearing/'believing in' face masks is a political issue, not an evidence based rational choice. It's tribal signaling. Noboby really knows a or b, but choosing to believe a or b has become (yet another) aspect of identity politics. Which is what worries me the most, because now that position has become entrenched, regardless of whether we reach any conclusive findings at some point in the future.

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