I wear one more than the law requires, but I'm not going to be evangelical about it.
Certainly, some people are out to "get" anyone they can, and use masks as a weapon they can adopt in their self-righteous, odious,
cockwombling crusading. Usually it's the same characters who don't realise how boringly repulsive they are to be around. I know a schoolmistress, recently sidelined for tubthumping, though nobody would accuse specifically for that because of the straw-man responses they'd get.
There's so much boll@x around about masks.....
Mosts masks leak like crazy, and are NOT only going to afford protection to those around the wearer.
I've seen the most-lecturing idiots wearing the types with "respirator" valves, which allow your breath and contents out to the world unfiltered. I was told it was "on a website" that they are just as good. It turned out yes, it did say "just as good", but for the wearer! The valved masks do help protect the wearer even more than unvalved, because they allow the mask to
fit better.
It's common to say masks don't protect the wearer, which defies logic. Most wearing of masks for the few decades I've noticed, has been to protect the wearer; then covid cames along and no, no, no! Barking.
It's true that virions themselves are tiny and could pass through most masks, but they're very short lived unless they're in a droplet. Other particles (dry) can make up the aerosol population, but there again the virus "dies" quite quickly. If you're
filtering the atmosphere for covid, you're looking for droplet- bound covid. Droplets start life relatively huge, and are easier to filter in a mask. If you wear the same mask all day, liquid will evaporate from droplets, providing the wearer with a source of smaller particles.
In such practical surveys as I've found, there is evidence that masks help, though it's difficult to statistically discriminate from other factors which normally coexist in situations/communities which care about covid. Those would tend to ventilate better, if you're wearing a mask you're more likely to be aware about handwashing, and so on.
The neurotic will worry themselves into the ground about it, and the psychotic will ignore it even if it kills them - like they, and you, were going to die sometime anyway.
Damn, all these people are such a pain to live with!
