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Yes. Crazy how hard it has been for people to get this:

Imagine a bulletproof vest with three larger-than-bullet-sized holes in it. Say you know someone is going to shoot ten bullets at you - would you not wear the vest because "the attack vector can fit through the pores"?

The point is people treat this as a binary 'safe' / 'not safe' switch, when actually risk is related to the distribution of exposure to dosage.

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If we're talking about the size of the holes in a mask compared to a virus, then it would be more like wearing a "bulletproof" vest full of holes 10x bigger than a bullet.

But the area which does have coverage is still significant, right?

I guess it's a choice of analogy. If virus particles are like bullets, protection can be viewed as proportional. But if it's viewed more like a liquid, seeping through any hole, then only full watertight protection works. I'd argue that the reduced transmissibility we see from outdoor exposure supports the first of those as a more apt analogy.

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