That’s a completely disingenuous interpretation of what I wrote. The proposal that I described above, which was to provide free, superior quality masks to some groups in areas where most people were wearing low-quality cloth masks, wouldn’t have put a single person at higher risk than they were already. I seriously don’t get the hostility here to generating better data.
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It’s only disingenuous if you ignore all the tenets of ethical clinical study design. We aren’t testing mechanical structures, here; these data points are people. We only test those to failure when absolutely necessary.
In order to really study a clinical variable, we need to run a large randomized study. Any time such a study withholds a known benefit from a portion of the studied population, the risk to that population has to be assessed and weighed against the value of the data.
ETA: your proposal about better masks seems reasonable, but it wasn’t the sole content of your post. You started your post with agreement with a post that stated that, before requiring masking in healthcare environments, the subject needed to be studied. Based on my 30+ years of working on study design for human and animal clinical trials, I don’t think there is an IRB in the US that would agree to such a study due to the risk to the subjects.
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At no point did the government provide free N95 masks to school populations. You’re suggesting that providing them to some schools but not all of them in a systematic study to quantify the amount of benefit they provide over cloth masks would be profoundly unethical and that providing nothing (which is exactly what happened) is the better option? Hard disagree.
Early in the pandemic there’s no way that the government could have wrangled enough masks to provide free N95s for all students due to scarcity. But getting enough of them out there to generate good data was a realistic option that they chose not to pursue.
Read my edit.
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Just over 1000 signatures on said petition.
Sad.
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If people thought of masks as a point-source pollution control, would that help?
We have catalytic converters for cars, because we know where the pollution is coming from. Same with scrubbers on smokestacks.
Asking for people to wear masks to prevent them inadvertently polluting the air for others doesn’t seem so out there. Yes, it’d be great if we had more data, but the data we do have points to filtration as a key safeguard against transmitting this virus. 
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The issue would appear to be that non-airtight masks have proven to protect others more than the wearer themself and far too many people have proven to simply not give a fuck about other people.
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This whole argument is ridiculous. It’s not about where you can get vaccinated or whether pharmacies offer free delivery.
Masks are needed in pharmacies because there is a significantly higher chance that people in pharmacies have communicable diseases, as it is a medical setting.
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It’s not a horrendous sacrifice, but at this point people need to recognize that cloth masks offer a simulacrum of protection, are absolutely nowhere near medically adequate, and so any mandate that allows people to wear cloth masks is more about enforcing a feeling than science.
I wasn’t always this way. In the beginning of the pandemic I made over 40 cloth masks for our local Cambridge hospital. My sewing machine skills got significantly better. And my kids and I had numerous different handmade cloth masks that we wore. (I did eventually turn to etsy when the kids’ filthy faces went through masks faster than I wanted to sew them.)
But that was because real masks didn’t exist, because the government fucked up. Ok, it happened. But along the way we all convinced ourselves that cloth masks were fine, because we had to argue so loudly against the stupid fucking anti-maskers.
This is where “I mask for you, you mask for me” came in, because cloth masks were so crap they only really worked as a source-filter. And they worked barely acceptably for that, but it’s what we had.
We finally have (well, for well over a year) real N95s for anyone who needs them. Wearing an N95 protects you so much more than a whole pharmacy of other people wearing hand-made cloth masks does. Don’t just take my work for it, experts have been saying it for months.
A perspective published in May 2020 in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine ’ [3] concluded that cloth face masks offer little to no protection to the general population and healthcare workers.
[Plus a number of other references]
“Cloth masks are not going to cut it with omicron,” says Linsey Marr, a researcher at Virginia Tech who studies how viruses transmit in the air.
So for me, any mandate in 2022 that requires masks but allows for cloth masks is doing so more out of tribalism than science. It’s the panacea we feel when we see a store-full of good people all wearing their cheery homemade masks. But if we actually cared about our own safety, or that of our loved ones, we’d slap on an N95 and be done with it, and stop caring so much about what the others are wearing, because the additional protection all those low-quality masks provide is minimal at best.
(Note: this is not anti-mandates, especially not in places like hospitals where, around me, require real quality masks. It’s the stores near me with “mask mandates” and all the customers and employees are wearing cloth masks. And it’s my friends who wear cloth masks to grocery stores and complain about other customers not wearing them.)
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That probably depends what country/state/city you live in. Where I am, for every supermarket and big box store with a pharmacy, there are several more dedicated pharmacies (Walgreens, CVS). Although, to be fair, those “dedicated” pharmacies sell so much other crap they’re practically box stores themselves.
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Depends entirely on your definition of “adequate.” A cloth mask is pretty effective at protecting others from you. They are slightly effective at protecting you from others. An N95 is better, a PAPR is better yet. But a cloth mask is at least decent for protecting folks who are the most in need of protecting. Of course, they should also be masked, but masking is an additive thing, so if both are masked that is even better. And if my choices are cloth mask or no mask, I will take the cloth.
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I used “cloth” metaphorically rather than literally (I have worn a N95 for at least two years now) - but even a storeful of cloth masks would be better than a storeful of naked faces.
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You’re acting like N95’s are this outlandish new thing that no one has ever seen before. They’ve existed for years before the COVID pandemic. They’ve been tested up the wazoo. For people who use them for work, to work with dangerous chemicals or what have you, there are quantitative fit-tests available that provide a pretty good estimate of exactly what sort of particles are getting through and how many of them are getting through. I think that even before COVID ever started, we had pretty good and solid evidence that yes, N95 masks work. For that matter, considering the widespread use of surgical masks in hospital and other medical settings, we’ve got research up the wazoo showing that those work too. What more do we need?
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Another of those things that, fuck, we’re 3 years into this and some people don’t get and others simply don’t give a shit about.
I don’t want to throw us off the rails here, but it makes me think of people equating not bringing an AK into a store with requiring everyone to wear body armor.
The body armor is just about protecting yourself, removing the AKs is about protecting everyone else.
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masks are the gun control of snot 
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It’s not a binary question of “do masks work” or not. Knowing the relative benefit of how effective cloth masks are vs. surgical masks vs. N95s in slowing the spread of Covid in schools would be extremely useful when schools and health departments have limited resources to spend on mitigations and want to get the most bang for their buck. Maybe it’s worth the cost to have the government purchase surgical masks for everyone but not necessarily pay for N95s for everyone? Hard to say for sure without better data.
If you have a robust study to point to which compares the relative real-world effectiveness of each of those types of masks for slowing spread in a school setting I’d love to see it. But the government didn’t do any such studies. And doing one like I described would have taken a minuscule amount of resources (at least compared to everything else we were doing) without putting a single person at higher risk.
But is it hard to say that wearing something to prevent or minimize one’s breath and breath droplets spreading through a shared breathing space can help reduce transmission of this particular (and a lot of other) viruses?
Can we just start there?
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We can but half the country thinks an underwear fart analogy is science.
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Not quite picking up what you’re laying down, which might be to my benefit in this case.
But can you elucidate?
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