That seems a little weird, given that a large Danish study says that masks doesn't reduce your risk of infection in a significant way.
At least in Denmark I don't think it's communicated very well why you should wear a mask. The government says "wear a mask" so the majority wears a mask. It's great that we have that level of trust in government, but it also sometimes mean that things are communicated as well as they should be.
I'd be curious to see if mask wearing Asian countries had less incidence of the flu than western countries.
The fact that places in the world (like Adelaide and Melbourne) even considered lockdown before requiring masks was incredibly lazy and/or negligent.
But something seemed to change, at least here in Thailand. Although mask wearing was normalized in cities as self-protection against air pollution, many/most people seemed to come around to the notion that mask-wearing was a collective effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. Seems like a cultural effect - more collectivist rather than individualist thinking.
That’s not what this study says. What the study actually says is that they found wildly huge odds ratios in their confidence interval. The only “conclusion” that can be drawn from this is that the study is inconclusive.
To explain further: to positively conclude that there’s no benefit to mask wearing, the study would have had to produce a small confidence interval around zero effect. In reality, its 95% confidence interval is between 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection. Any number between these bounds is compatible with the study results. That’s all over the place, and doesn’t allow any conclusion.