understanding that the issue, like most issues, is multi-faceted at the very least, but that certainly too much consideration and mindshare has been lost to them due to mediopolitical coercion playing on our fears and anxieties. masks have limited utility in most common situations, beyond the fluid mechanics/dynamics at play. they're primarily only useful when you can't (or won't) distance in close quarters, but they've become a totem for cargo-culting all sorts of inane rituals and behaviors en masse, in the service of various forms of power (as a small but pertinent example, medical professionals' career advancements are based on how well they toe the official narrative). masks might snag a given virus particle in a controlled experiment, but they're not going to stop, or even meaningfully slow, this pandemic despite the mediopolitical rhetoric.
Cloth masks are spit shields, nothing more. As spit shields, there's good evidence for their effectiveness. I've seen no convincing evidence that they're good for anything else.
> they've become a totem for cargo-culting all sorts of inane rituals and behaviors
I was just in the hospital for a week for an unrelated illness. Every person I encountered there said they had been vaccinated, yet they still insisted on masking everyone, even when it made communication difficult.
I'm a little terrified that this madness won't ever end-- that the bureaucratic fervor for masks, distancing, and various degrees of lockdowns will emerge again in response to bad flu seasons, for example.
i can actually see hospitals being a place where masks have more legitimacy, not specifically for corona, but for the confluence of many transmissible ailments accumulating there.
but with corona, while it's not undeniably confirmed yet, it's quite likely that vaccines dramatically shorten the window of infectiousness, allowing most of the vaccinated to stop wearing masks after a short window (~couple days, iirc). yet, the general recommendation remains that they be worn by the vaccinated public indefinitely. the cdc apparently is now literally doubling-down by recommending two masks be worn by everyone, completely ignoring the human social dynamics that overwhelm the assumed threat model implicit with masks.
if masks--or lockdowns for that matter--were dramatically effective, we'd see it in all the data we've fervently collected and analyzed over the past year. at best, we've found weak correlations all around (i.e., marginal effects), that suffer from unspecificity, because it's hard to unambiguously isolate independent variables from confounding ones in real world epidemiological data.
I've developed an obsessive fascination with the social and political aspects of masks. I think very little of our masking behavior is related to actual scientific evidence, on either side of the debate. Many people feel like wearing a mask and cleaning surfaces obsessively is the obvious response to a disease of any sort, even though the evidence overwhelmingly says that COVID is not effectively spread on surfaces, or outside of confined spaces with people sharing breathing air for extended periods of time.
On the other side there are people who associate masks with the political left, and would be so humiliated to appear cowed by "liberal" authority figures, that they'd refuse to wear a mask even if they were convinced of the medical risk.
I think I'm coming to the conclusion that the majority of mask adherence and refusal isn't rational, but rather religious, in the sense that it's shaped by beliefs that are immune to evidence.
What is the right focus? Is this a running discussion between you two?