Nope, definitely not. The reason for "maybe consider" is what Scott writes in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/31/ssc-journal-club-macintyre-on-cloth-masks/ …
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impression that medical studies that are counterintuitive and not extremely methodologically strong replicate like 30% of the time
I mean, here's how I'm reading this study: 1) throw out the control group; it's genuinely worse than useless as described — for all we know, they always wore a medical mask in close contact with the sick 2) conclude that medical masks work better than cloth masks — makes sense!
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Hmmm, I think you can do better than my 30% heuristic here but throwing out the control group, the study still finds that the difference between surgical and cloth is too large to be consistent with cloth being net-positive unless surgical is much much better than anyone thought
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Well, my follow-up assumption is that neither medical masks nor cloth masks work well if your full-time job is with infectious patients; the point at which you reach "zero difference" depends on how long you run the study, how infectious the patient pop is, etc.
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