over three years, have not had "the C word" or any other illness, for that matter. I have an autoimmune that necessitates high levels of immune suppression, so I have been masking right from the beginning (already had them as a precaution for hospital visits from before the pandemic).

I was always sick with something before I started wearing them constantly. I'm here to tell you, if that's you, good fitting N95s do work. I really like the way this article lays out how we know they do, and why the studies that proport to show that they don't, are deeply flawed.

Of course masks work. Intelligent people do not dispute this, do they?

Yes, they do.

The New York Times recently published a masks don't work op-ed, though "intelligent people" may not include Bret StephensOpinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Le...

I am glad that my surgeons have always worn masks that is for sure

Also the NYTimes stopped being a source of reliable information years ago, in my opinion.

Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the sp... This has been widely interpreted to mean that masks don't work. It doesn't actually say that, but it says something like "we can't tell one way or the other" which was enough for lots of people to run with MASKS DON'T WORK

The piece I posted above explains why we can't tell whether they work doing the kinds of studies Cochrane relied upon.

I live in a very red part of California and nobody has masked for years. Many people did not mask during the mandated masking. People have to be told constantly to put masks on in hospital settings, which was the last place that still had mandates in California.

There are still signs up at the hospital I spent the day in Friday, saying they are mandatory. About a third of people were wearing them. Needless to say the majority of folks around here do not believe they do anything.

that is because 1) people are stupid and 2) cable news distributes misinformation. The sad thing is people are dead because of both of those things

Chestnut: YEP