The answer to the question is no because idiots run the world.
The CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, remains determined to ignore the best research on masks, as she made clear in a congressional hearing earlier this month. “Our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time,” she said, when asked how the new review from Cochrane would affect the agency’s policies. “This is an important study,” she conceded, “but the Cochrane review only includes randomized clinical trials, and, as you can imagine, many of the randomized clinical trials. . . were for other respiratory viruses.”
The Real Science on Masks: They Make No Difference – The Free Press
The common argument for being pro-masking in public is surgeons wear masks to prevent themselves from infecting patients. It’s so stupid to have to explain that an operating room is a highly controlled sterile environment and the people in the room wear masks to prevent coughing, sneezing, or spittle from talking from entering the open wounds of the patient.
The world is not sterile. The world is full of germs, bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens. You can’t avoid them. You’re not meant to avoid them. Your body has systems to fight them. If you didn’t have these systems you’d already be dead.
It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature on masks, including trials during the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals and in community settings. The trials compared outcomes of wearing surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also wearing surgical masks versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness.
It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly—and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs.
Whatever theoretical benefits there might be, in clinical trials the benefits have turned out to be either illusory or offset by negative factors. Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.”
The Real Science on Masks: They Make No Difference – The Free Press