The benefit is always vastly overstated with masks, and the cost always downplayed. You’re implying masks lead to happy hospitals, and masks are just a minor inconvenience.
Reality? Masks don’t seem that effective, they may reduce spread in some circumstances, but there’s so little evidence that mask mandates (the way we do them in America) have done much good. Obviously there’s a risk reduction on an individual level when an infected person wears a well-fitted, effective mask like an N95, but at a population level it hasn’t seemed to really help much. Every study seems to have huge error bars and a lot of confounding variables.
> You’re implying masks lead to happy hospitals, and masks are just a minor inconvenience.
Masks lead to fewer cases and yes that means happier hospitals. The science says that masks work and the majority of people accept that fact. Mandates work too, but only to the extent that they are followed and enforced. In fact they work so well that a certain embarrassed republican governor who had evidence that they work decided to try to hide that information from the public so he can keep pushing anti-mask lies to his base (https://missouriindependent.com/2021/12/01/missouri-health-d...)
The real problem with tracking the effectiveness of mask mandates comes from fact that case numbers and deaths are easy to track, but it's much harder to track the number of places that refuse to enforce the mandates that are in place or the number of people who decide to ignore the mandate or try to get around them by dick-nosing.
It's a difficult problem because there are a lot of reasons people oppose mask wearing. For some it's just simple petulance. Insisting on stricter enforcement of mandates just gets stronger push back from those folks who'll stomp their feet and take a very "You're not my mom!" attitude about anyone telling them what to do. Others have just been mislead by misinformation and they can be reached out to and informed but so many have made mask wearing political and it's extremely hard to get people to listen to facts that they've built an identity around rejecting.
Mandates aren't the ideal. I genuinely wish they weren't needed (both because community spread was lower and people had more faith in science) but because we're stuck with a percentage of the population that is anti-mask for whatever reason the best we can do is try to drag them kicking and screaming into doing the right thing by issuing mandates and hope that enough of the anti-maskers in our communities will do their part that it helps.
The problem, as you point out, is that mask mandates are effective only in the fantasy world where the population adheres rigorously and uses the right kinds of masks. And even then, you’re only limiting spread by some amount in masked scenarios. A mask mandate doesn’t stop one family member from infecting the whole family. The biggest spread vector has always been the home.
I agree, it's an imperfect tool. It's just one of the best ones we have at the moment and when things get bad enough in an area people will reach to anything that will help.
Reality? Masks don’t seem that effective, they may reduce spread in some circumstances, but there’s so little evidence that mask mandates (the way we do them in America) have done much good. Obviously there’s a risk reduction on an individual level when an infected person wears a well-fitted, effective mask like an N95, but at a population level it hasn’t seemed to really help much. Every study seems to have huge error bars and a lot of confounding variables.