These people are stuck adhering to the mask propaganda from 2020. The lies were 'justified' at the time because high adoption meant spreaders were covered.
Unless you have advanced medical grade masks and swap them regularly, surgical masks and other common covering do literally nothing to protect the wearer from COVID. Once spit particles are airborne, even N95s don't stop much. And yes I've seen the videos about static attraction. Which is maybe partially true for fresh masks, but the attic attraction fades quickly as your breath saturates the material with moisture
Rule of thumb: if you can smell what's around you – or what was around you 5 seconds ago – you're not protected from airborne biohazardous material. That said, there are masks that do protect you.
That masks only stop infectious spread is a commonly held view due to the documented and provable failure of public health organizations to ingest scientific knowledge, understand it, and act on it.
Masks in general—speaking of masks without any further specification of mask type or form—those do very little. What little they do is yes, mostly reducing spread I believe.
Masks that lie fully against the face without gaps and are made out of modern filtration materials, these stop the infectious aerosol no matter which way it’s going. In or out. Properly thought out masks fit for purpose basically stop COVID stone cold. These masks are known as “respirator masks” for some unfortunate reason.
The public health failure I mention is described here for instance: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ina.13070
Paper title: ”What were the historical reasons for the resistance to recognizing airborne transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic?”
Here’s a recent meta-study coming to that exact conclusion:
> “[…] the subgroup showed a significant protective effect of using N95 respirators, particularly for medical staff.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...