🔥 Kareem Carr  🔥

I'm fine if wearing a mask discourages some people from talking at me in a confined space.

Confounding by indication?

Better actually

More generally, people inclined to put on masks are also likely those more prone to adopt the whole package of barrier gestures... Less causal relationship. Yet, it should not underestimate the fact that masks are physical barriers.

The rumor I heard was that masks increase humidity in the nasal passages and thus let mucus membranes do their job better. Lots of possible effects beyond filtering particles.

Also it probably depends on the type of mask itself.. earlier on in the pandemic there was some study about the effectiveness of different types of masks and it looked like there were some big differences

Yes - which has greater negative impacts for children than adults, since children need to learn how to socialize. Our kids had no one to play with for almost 1 year. Other families were too scared and playgrounds were closed. Masking kids is not benign.

Which is sort of funny, because they realize that the social effect is *happening,* and complain about it constantly. They just don't connect the dots from less person-to-person contact -> less person-to-person transmission.