They cost money and require effort. Therefore, there are downsides.
Defining a set of actions as literally cost free is a logical fallacy. Nothing is ever cost free. The moment you do this you're obliged to engage in that action 24/7 for the rest of your life, immediately and indefinitely, as any possible benefit would justify doing it - even imagined benefits that exist only in the realm of future hypotheticals. Worse, once someone makes this error, they start to believe everyone else is irrational because why would they not engage in this completely downside-free behavior too?
it's pretty clear it was effective.
The article mentions the Cochrane Review which rigorously concluded the opposite. However you don't need a meta-study. Community masking was justified on the claim that it would create a downward inflection in the case numbers. Go to ourworldindata and select COVID case graphs for a few countries you're not familiar with, then try to figure out when they imposed or removed mask mandates by searching for the inflections. You won't be able to because no such inflections were ever created. So mask mandates had no impact when judged by their own (stated) goals.
> The article mentions the Cochrane Review which rigorously concluded the opposite.
Do you mean this one?
"Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.
It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people's risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses."
Yes, that one. From the "We need scientific dissidents" article this thread is about:
When Tom Jefferson and his group published a report saying “We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed,” the editor in chief of Cochrane apologized for the wording, even though subsequent surveys showed the language was standard for Cochrane given the nature of the evidence.
The incoherent attempt at walking back the study findings by Cochrane administration is the type of problem the article is discussing. It came after a pressure campaign by a social media influencer [1] and the New York Times [2], not due to any actual problem with the review (which AFAIK remains unaltered).
The actual study authors stand by their conclusions. But consider something else: the statement on their website is nonsensical, asserting that it's wrong to accept the null hypothesis in this case despite a large multi-study failure to find significant results. But that's not how science works. You start by assuming the null (community masking/mandates don't work), and then try to disprove it. If you can't then you stick with the initial belief that there's nothing there, you don't assert that anything failing to find what you want is "inconclusive" - that's starting from a conclusion and working backwards.
The thing is people elide the correct conclusion of that study to "masks don't work" which is not what the study says, and it is actually a hypothesis that has been roundly disproven... there are numerous studies showing the efficacy of mask wearing for preventing the spread of infectious diseases. They apologized for the wording for a good reason, which is that people took it out of context to suggest something that is not only not what the study said but contradicts a variety of other research.
This is a hard one... the parent commenter mentioned that there should be some indication about when people were told to wear masks in the charts that show the spread of the virus in at least some countries. That's difficult to see anywhere... the study you link to says that they were simply unable to show whether masks are effective because of "the high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies".
Let me give a little anecdote about that... Brazil was one of the worst affected countries, despite having made it mandatory to wear masks. Sweden, on the other hand, only made it mandatory to wear masks in a few very limited situations (e.g. public transport), and even then, only after the pandemic was already dying down, much later than most countries. And Sweden seems to have had a below OECD average rate of deaths due to the pandemic.
I know it's a difficult comparison to make: Sweden's healthcare system is likely more "competent" than Brazil's (because it can afford much more, but both have free or nearly free healthcare available to everyone) and people in Sweden tended to be less skeptical of the virus (personal experience, not sure this can be shown by data) - that makes a big difference as people in Brazil would often wear a mask just because they were forced to, and hence wore it incorrectly and didn't really try hard to make it effective, while in Sweden people did it by their own accord (for the longest time, Sweden only recommended to wear, but did not make the mask mandatory) and were much more likely to have done their research about how to better make use of the mask to avoid getting infected.
Also, it has been shown that most deaths in Sweden occurred early on, among the elderly living in nursing homes where employees (who are almost always foreigners with a very different culture and hence, I suggest, less likely to properly wear masks and follow government recommendations to contain the spread of the virus, like completely avoiding meeting people who are not living in the same household) were the main source of infections - so if you take that into account, the fact that people in Sweden were mostly not wearing masks at all for most of the pandemic should show that, at the very least, wearing masks was not the most effective way to keep the virus under control.
My takeaway is that masks may help, but only if you actually believe it will help and take sufficient care to wear a proper mask and do it properly... and that other measures, like voluntary social distancing, turned out to have been more effective than just wearing masks.
They cost money and require effort. Therefore, there are downsides.
Defining a set of actions as literally cost free is a logical fallacy. Nothing is ever cost free. The moment you do this you're obliged to engage in that action 24/7 for the rest of your life, immediately and indefinitely, as any possible benefit would justify doing it - even imagined benefits that exist only in the realm of future hypotheticals. Worse, once someone makes this error, they start to believe everyone else is irrational because why would they not engage in this completely downside-free behavior too?
it's pretty clear it was effective.
The article mentions the Cochrane Review which rigorously concluded the opposite. However you don't need a meta-study. Community masking was justified on the claim that it would create a downward inflection in the case numbers. Go to ourworldindata and select COVID case graphs for a few countries you're not familiar with, then try to figure out when they imposed or removed mask mandates by searching for the inflections. You won't be able to because no such inflections were ever created. So mask mandates had no impact when judged by their own (stated) goals.