What is the common ground? I for one am happy that the vast majority of people do not find the tradeoff acceptable. Ubiquitous masking during COVID was dystopian and damaging and I couldn't imagine having this indefinitely.
Would that be acceptable to your social group do you think?
But I'd rather prozelitize about taking measures for one's defense (everything to support the immune system, vitamin D, proper nutrition, etc), than the theatrical masking we've seen so far.
Again, if it's serious than at least wear a mask that offers some believable protection.
Even with millions of deaths, we were incredibly lucky that CV-19 had only a ~2% case/fatality rate. Many other diseases are far higher, including the Avian Flu H5N1 at over 50% in humans.
Being healthy is a false sense of security (i.e., you don't know what you are talking about and are spreading ignorance). For example the group the 1918 Flu pandemic killed most was yoing healthy males (incl my wife's GGP). Why? Because it caused a huge immune system response called a cytokine storm, and the most healthy males had the strongest immune response, and it killed them (yes, our biological system has a few bugs).
The entire job of diseases is to overcome healthy subjects and spread despite this.
Stop spreading ignorant wishful thinking.
Wearing a mask offers much less protection to yourself and others than taking measures for your immune health, but that's somehow controversial and never discussed at a societal level. I'm still shocked vitamin D supplementation was barely mentioned during COVID. But authorities only cared for theatrical measures, and imitating each other so they don't stand out.
Your immune system works well, but when we're talking about human pathogens, they are specifically organisms that have figured out how to defeat several levels of countermeasures and will harm you.
More on respirator physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAdanPfQdCA
EDIT: I see above you've noted respirators work. Masks also work, but not perfectly. See this video as to why surgical masks are still useful. In fact Taiwan achieved zero COVID using almost exclusively universal masking until more transmissible variants showed up.
COVID is remarkable among human pathogens because it is so damn transmissible. High percentage mask wearing completely stomps out weaker viruses (we eliminated a flu strain in 2020). COVID is almost as transmissible as measles (R0 for Omicron is commonly estimated above 8 and as high as 24), so it takes an array of countermeasures or high quality countermeasures to arrest it. Still, mask wearing will reduce the number of people infected per a unit time, making environments much safer.
Now that we are in a regime where R0 is less applicable since people have some immunity to COVID, the transmission rate is closer to 1-3. This is something masks can manage to stomp so long as there is partial immunity.
Again, I hope the general public never accepts this ever again. I don't want to live in a world so obsessed with safety and safety theater that it accepts such a radical transformation of the public space. So what Taiwan does it.
I hope the info you shared is valuable to someone, I don't have the inclination to make my case in further detail, so I'll just stay at this level of argumentation: the tradeoff is unacceptable to me, and, I hope, to the majority. If it ever comes down to this again, I'll make a serious effort to relocate to somewhere still sane.
But it will NOT prevent infection.
A properly fitted N95/N99 mask will. It takes about 700 viral particles (early strains) entering the airways to start an infection (obviously variance involved). Cutting out 95-99% of the particles you breath in an exposure event gives you 20X to 100X margin to prevent infection.
When good masks are generally used, those effects are multiplied together, as the contagious person's spreading of viruse particles is reduced by 20-100X, and your mask reduces that attenuated stream by another 20-100X.
These effects are why the R0 of all airborne diseases is cut when most people take measures. We can see this because while the spread of the more contagious CV-19 was reduced, entire strains of influenza went EXTINCT. Wiped out forever. They could thrive in an unmasked population, but died out when people even masked badly and inconsistently.