That's why there's this huge focus on masks stopping the spread by pre-symptomatic people, which is a highly dubious and never-before tried idea, for which basically no reliable evidence exists (masks pre-COVID being intended to stop you getting sick, not other people), and which is an absolutely pure form of virtue signalling. It's literally a highly visible sign that someone is suffering discomfort for someone else's health, except, that only works if you believe it's actually true.
Look at the Nordics. In Sweden there's no mask requirement because the epidemic is disappearing. In Norway they pointed out that given the tiny number of infected people, even if you assume masks work perfectly, 200,000 people would need to wear a mask constantly to stop one new infection. And this is a virus with an IFR of about 0.1% so you end up needing millions of people to wear masks constantly to stop just a single death, almost certainly of a person very close to the end of their life anyway.
The numbers just don't work, at all, once the epidemic has faded away. And as Sweden and other places shows it can fade away without any mask requirements.