I've never had COVID. In fact, the last respiratory infection I had was in 2019. I sing, masked, in a 90 member choir where few people do mask, and we've had a couple COVID outbreaks. In one case, the people who sat to my right and left both caught the bug.

I'm not going to speak to the particulars of the various mask mandates. That's a complicated and nuanced question. One thing I know for sure: N95 masks, properly applied, make a huge difference to (at least) the person wearing them.

shorter version: Cochrane Review on efficacy of masking vs. respiratory disease

For the communal masking method that was deployed early on in the pandemic due to N95 respirator shortages, you're correct.

> At best, masking is a practice that makes the wearer think they're doing something "courteous", when they really aren't doing anything beneficial at all.

Fortunately in 2024, individuals have the freedom to choose to wear an N95 for their own personal protection. These devices are effective when worn properly, especially compared to vaccines when trying to minimize transmission to prevent reinfections which increase the risk of long COVID.

You know, surgeons don't wear masks solely to protect themselves, right? They wear them to protect their patients as well as themselves. In fact, that's kind of the main idea.

When the droplets that you exhale through a mask change direction, they lose velocity, and consequently range.

I blame the lack of hands-on science education for the large number of people who don't intuitively grasp concepts like this. It's easy to blame things like right-wing media, but the media would have less power over people if they were given the opportunity to cultivate some common sense in childhood. In that regard, it sounds like things are only going to get worse.