"Masks don't work for a highly infectious respiratory illness, but also please save them for health workers so they don't get sick" is a pretty dark calibration re: Just Exactly How Stupid Do You Think We Are
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Per Scott Alexander, getting am adequate face seal on a real-deal N-95 surgical mask is actually frustratingly hard. That said, surgical masks help more than zero and don't make a perfect seal.
Makes perfect sense to me that an N95 with a perfect seal is pretty critical for someone working a medical job indoors with a COVID ward. But there's a big difference between that & the needs of someone who is only having brief indoor interactions with a low # of infected people
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It's also a situation where a modest (~50%) reduction in probability of infection from a given contact can make a big difference in how catastrophic an epidemic is.
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It looks like there aren't super hard numbers on how effective paper surgical masks are in the wild, but it seems like the smart money is somewhere between kind of and fairly.
End of conversation
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