That is very good news.
Whilst the Cochrane review does not present clear statistical results from their meta analysis that support mask wearing of any type (it does support hand washing to an extent), it is good to see further analysis of these important questions. Further peer review and questioning should push potential future authors to make reports more robust so that everyone can have access to fully justifiable (i.e. what the data says and what the science says so that the loop is completed and consistent) conclusions and recommendations.
That is a genuinely bizarre article: the authors are essentially arguing that yes, of course you’re going to find that masks don’t work, if you don’t restrict your research to settings involving the mandated, constant use of N95 respirators. And I’m sure that that’s not their intention. These people, honestly.
That is the current consensus. You wear a mask for others, not yourself. A FFP3 respirator *does* provide a reasonably good (measurably good) level of protection to the wearer, a surgical (etc) mask doesn't. Surgical masks work on the basis that if most people wear them most of the time then there will be fewer viruses floating about in the air for you to inhale. Surgical masks catch the big particles and droplets as you exhale, they don't do much to stop you imhaling smaller particles floating about, because as you say they don't fit very well to the face. That's the FF bit of the specification. FF = Face Fit. P3 is level of protection, where P3 is better than P2 and much better than P1.
I thought that the consensus was then and is now that Covid is borne by the air but not airborne. Has that now been revised? The debate I remember from 2020 was the degree to which the virus was transmitted by the air as opposed to fomite transmission. I'll confess to not having spent too long studying the latest research on transmission vectors, though I do know that air-mediated transmission is now known to be more important than was believed to be the case in 2020.
I think a range of dogmatic positions were established fairly early on, but what I managed to glean is that it's better than nothing, maybe quite a bit better than nothing. An unintended consequence of some of the more extreme pro-mask discourse is that a lot of people think that surgical masks are pointless for individual protection, and I don't think that's the case.
I'm not sure anyone's questioning the effectiveness of FFP3 masks, for individual protection. The question seems to be whether anything less is worth bothering with, and the conversation seems to have taken an odd but predictable turn there.
The Bangladesh study, referenced in the Conversation report, describes an 11% reduction in people wearing surgical masks getting infected with Covid under the conditions that they were monitored, i.e. community use in Bangladesh.
Yes, difficult to translate conclusions from a study of community transmission into implications for individual protection, but taken together the studies I’m aware of (or was) do seem to suggest surgical masks are better than nothing. That’s good enough for me in my situation, where all I really want to do is reduce the number of viral illnesses I get (and the number of people I pass them on to). I’ve just made it part of my personal hygiene routine, same as washing my hands and not touching my face. I’m aware of course that others have different needs, but I think realistically masks are now an individual matter.
