I'm triggered.
1) As above, just because 'people do it' doesn't mean its effective. It's also traditional to wear a garlic clove when in the presence of vampires. Here, we have a significant number of doctors admitting they do it for no good reason at all:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/
A contemporary questionnaire-based study, which attempted to assess the attitudes of surgeons, revealed that 96% of responders wore facemasks.1 About equal numbers did so with the primary aim of protecting the patients compared to protecting themselves. However, it was also found that 20% of responding surgeons wore the mask for the sole purpose of respecting tradition. Furthermore, 30% of responding surgeons felt that masks could make surgery more difficult by increasing breath condensation on spectacles, endoscopes and microscopes and thereby obscuring vision.
The study goes on to demonstrate that
even in clinical setting with proper usage, masks have little evidence to support the current level of usage on the medical field.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/
Unmasking the surgeons: the evidence base behind the use of facemasks in surgery
Abstract
The use of surgical facemasks is ubiquitous in surgical practice. Facemasks have long been thought to confer protection to the patient from wound infection and contamination from the operating surgeon and other members of the surgical staff. More recently, protection of the theatre staff from patient-derived blood/bodily fluid splashes has also been offered as a reason for their continued use. In light of current NHS budget constraints and cost-cutting strategies, we examined the evidence base behind the use of surgical facemasks.
Examination of the literature revealed much of the published work on the matter to be quite dated and often studies had poorly elucidated methodologies. As a result, we recommend caution in extrapolating their findings to contemporary surgical practice. However, overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination. More rigorous contemporary research is needed to make a definitive comment on the effectiveness of surgical facemasks.
Here is a clinical trial showing NEGATIVE effects of masking:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/
Abstract
It has never been shown that wearing surgical face masks decreases postoperative wound infections. On the contrary, a 50% decrease has been reported after omitting face masks. The present study was designed to reveal any 30% or greater difference in general surgery wound infection rates by using face masks or not. During 115 weeks, a total of 3,088 patients were included in the study. Weeks were denoted as "masked" or "unmasked" according to a random list. After 1,537 operations performed with face masks, 73 (4.7%) wound infections were recorded and, after 1,551 operations performed without face masks, 55 (3.5%) infections occurred. This difference was not statistically significant (p greater than 0.05) and the bacterial species cultured from the wound infections did not differ in any way, which would have supported the fact tha the numerical difference was a statistically "missed" difference. These results indicated that the use of face masks might be reconsidered. Masks may be used to protect the operating team from drops of infected blood and from airborne infections, but have not been proven to protect the patient operated by a healthy operating team.
Cochrane is not supportive:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
Medical/surgical masks compared to no masks
We included 12 trials (10 cluster RCTs) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness (two trials with healthcare workers and 10 in the community). Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza=like illness (ILI)/COVID=19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate-certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory-confirmed influenza/SARS-CoV-2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate-certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low-certainty evidence).
2) There was no general recommendation on what masks are most effective, and in fact Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General posted a video tutorial on how to make cloth masks. No masks stop covid, but cloth masks, um, stop it the least (and some INCREASE aerosolization).
3) There was no consensus on how to properly wear and use masks, people essentially did it all wrong. Reality:
Medical professionals sterilize, don PPE, enter a sterile area to do a specific short term task, leave, take PPE off and dispose of, then resterilize.
VS
The public uses a wide variety of masks, from cloth to medical to n95 to grandma's coffee table doily. They don't sterilize before or after putting them on, they reuse them endlessly, they touch they mask, their child, the gas pump, put it in their pocket with their keys, hand their keys to their spouse, etc. IF you believe SARS-Cov-2 is the worstest pandemic in history, as many seem to, and you believe masks are filtering those virions and saving you from death, why the everlasting **** would you do all of the above with the biohazard-laden mask?
In short, it's because you're a fucking moron with 0 intellect. Moreover, there is a study where doctors and nurses were trained AGAIN on how to don an N95, then tested after they put them on. Two thirds did not put them on correctly, and those are trained professionals.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33733471/
Conclusions: All male and female nurses wearing surgical masks failed to pass OSHA and AIHA criteria. Global fit factor of the proposed FFP3 filtering respirators was decreased and worse in male than female nurses.
LOL! 'Medical professional'....there are very few of these. Mostly, there are people who mindlessly parrot what they were told to say in an extended, super-expensive 7yr brainwashing session.
What do you think the general publics rate of success is?
No one was instructed to shave their facial hair, which completely negates the filtration of a mask. You could wear a $3 Amazon mesh glitter mask, and get hi fives as you entered the mask mandatory location due to the power of your virtue signaling.
3) Smart people quickly found the OSHA-type studies on masks, airflow, sneezes//coughs/expiration, and particle behavior. Let me summarize:
Cloth masks block 10-30% of particles expelled in a sneeze/cough.
As Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases doctor at Stanford University, explained to New York magazine in December, cloth masks and face coverings don’t filter aerosols — the particles through which the coronavirus spreads — particularly well; they can escape from an infected person and easily be inhaled if both parties are wearing cloth face coverings.
Medical masks block 30-50%. N95's are supposed to block 95%, but they don't: how much they block depends on how well it's worn, which is not well at all, but let's say 50-75% for the general public.
You might be thinking '75% is a lot, and worthwhile'. You're wrong.
The average sneeze expels 50-200 MILLION particles, from large, clearly visible globs, to invisible to the naked eye virion-sized particles.
It's been shown that 1 virion can theoretically infect with some diseases, but we have immune systems that work, and in general a healthy person would require exposure to 1000-5000 SARS-Cov-2 virions to be infected.
So, if your best case mask scenario blocks 75% of 50 MILLION, you still have 12.5 MILLION virions floating around. You need 1k-5k to infect. Can you do math/statistics?
If you understand airflow dynamics, and what happens to the smaller droplets as the moisture evaporates, and how the remaining virions float around a room and remain airborn for extended periods.....
Well, it's actually not hard to understand at all why this was a stupid fucking circle-jerk from the start, and these known facts are why, at first, Fauci et al said openly that masking is a ridiculous premise.
Let's quantify all this with hard numbers from Norway:
https://www.fhi.no/globalassets/dokumenterfiler/rapporter/2020/should-individuals-in-the-community-without-respiratory-symptoms-wear-facemasks-to-reduce-the-spread-of-covid-19-report-2020.pdf
Non-medical facemasks include a variety of products. There is no reliable evidence of the effectiveness of non-medical facemasks in community settings. There is likely to be substantial variation in effectiveness between products. However, there is only limited evidence from laboratory studies of potential differences in effectiveness when different products are used in the community. Given the low prevalence of COVID-19 currently, even if facemasks are assumed to be effective, the difference in infection rates between using facemasks and not using facemasks would be small. Assuming that 20% of people infectious with SARS-CoV-2 do not have symptoms, and assuming a risk reduction of 40% for wearing facemask, 200 000 people
would need to wear facemasks to prevent one new infection per week in the current epidemiological situation.
........