Logic issues with this: gauze and handkerchief masks were suboptimal perhaps but probably not useless. This is also an unrepeatable experiment - without masks it might have been worse, closing public spaces might have been better, etc.
This frustrates any discussion about the pandemic and government response (and more broadly practically any question about govt policy & history), namely that these assertions always resort to counterfactuals.
So what happened and what could have happened with different policies is essentially unfalsifiable.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...