> We concluded that household use of face masks is associated with low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease.
"Do masks work, if you use the right type of mask and wear it properly?" isn't particularly controversial (the answer is probably "yes") but it's a stupid question because we don't care about optimal use, we care about real world use. And in the real world people might improperly wear a mask and go outside when they're symptomatic.
We don't have much good quality evidence for that, but here's a study that showed people were prepared to do things like wear masks, but were less prepared to self-isolate or book a test if they had symptoms: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.15.20191957v...
"However, during a severe pandemic when use of face masks might be greater, pandemic transmission in households could be reduced."
Later: "Although our study suggests that community use of face masks is unlikely to be an effective control policy for seasonal respiratory diseases, adherent mask users had a significant reduction in the risk for clinical infection. [...] Adherence with treatments and preventive measures is well known to vary depending on perception of risk and would be expected to increase during an influenza pandemic. [...] Therefore, although we found that distributing masks during seasonal winter influenza outbreaks is an ineffective control measure characterized by low adherence, results indicate the potential efficacy of masks in contexts where a larger adherence may be expected, such as during a severe influenza pandemic or other emerging infection."
> We concluded that household use of face masks is associated with low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease.
"Do masks work, if you use the right type of mask and wear it properly?" isn't particularly controversial (the answer is probably "yes") but it's a stupid question because we don't care about optimal use, we care about real world use. And in the real world people might improperly wear a mask and go outside when they're symptomatic.
We don't have much good quality evidence for that, but here's a study that showed people were prepared to do things like wear masks, but were less prepared to self-isolate or book a test if they had symptoms: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.15.20191957v...