After your sophistry the comment still stands... how can write that unsubstantiated bullshit and call yourself a scientist.
We in CA have been under a facemask mandate...
And I would judge compliance indoors outside the home to be very close to 100 percent. Yet the virus is exploding.
2. The studies we do have show that people who wear masks get covid at the same rate as people who do not. And all we have is crap studies like meta studies showing wearing a face mask may prevent spread.
You would need much more accurate data than is available, particularly in the U.S., to statistically distinguish the probability of becoming infected if you are a mask wearer versus not a mask wearer. This is because of two factors: one is that most people who wear masks regularly don't always wear a mask and any estimate of what percent of the time they are not wearing a mask and not social distancing has high variance, particularly in the U.S. The other factor is that
as the incidence of carriers in a population increases the probability of becoming infected while wearing a mask approaches that of the probability of becoming infected while not wearing a mask.
If you want to understand the situation in California, and indeed much of the nation, you might start by reading the remarks I put in italics in my post #143. This explains what you are experiencing in California, where there is presently good compliance with mask wearing. You can contrast the California situation with that in Taiwan and South Korea where there was universal compliance with mask wearing before the virus got a foothold.. In Japan compliance was not as universal at the outset of the disease and this shows in the somewhat higher infection rate, but still low, especially considering population density. In the U.S. there was initially, and there still is, a complete absence of a unified national policy.
The main point however is that Masks are much more effective when there is virtually universal compliance
BEFORE the virus gets a foot hold. This is born out strikingly by the data.
The U.S. is at one extreme where guidance from the Federal government was not lacking but suppressed and tampered with by an incompetent federal administration. The result was entirely predictable. Eventually once the virus was well established and wreaking havoc in some densely populated areas, the various State governments either urged or mandated mask wearing and shut down certain types of activities. By contrast in Taiwan and South Korea there was mask wearing with excellent compliance as soon as the potential threat was recognized and before the virus began to spread wildly. In the other Western Nations, outside of the U.S. there was coordinated national policy, however in countries that were first affected it came too late and in other countries compliance varied as did population density -- which is a key factor. So in these other Western countries you find quite variable results, but not surprisingly the results are well correlated both with the degree of compliance with Mask wearing and the amount of viral spread that had already occurred at the onset of mask wearing.
The data is clear, universal mask wearing and social distancing is strikingly effective,
but only if mask wearing occurs before the virus gets a substantial foothold. This is because mask wearing only gives somewhere between 60-70% protection -- in aggregate -- according to the studies available.. If you take the probability of becoming infected while both wearing a mask and social distancing and combine it with the probability of coming in contact with the virus, you will immediately see the value of having a national coordinating office in place
before a pandemic threatens (in the U.S. that would be the CDC and the Special Office set up by the Obama administration to handle threatened pandemics -- and we know what happened to this agency and this office!).
We can assume that even though mask wearing is 60-70% effective it is still worthwhile in combination with social distancing, even when a pandemic is already underway. Because of imperfect protection, however, we can't expect these measures alone to halt a pandemic once well embedded in a population. To do that, we will need either an exceedingly large number of deaths or a widely administered vaccine.
