Neither one of your sources say anything about masks not being useful in preventing spread. The second is also dependent on vaccination numbers.
Never said it was a litmus test for anything. These are temporary measures and people are being fucking selfish idiots.
So restricting people's rights is not also "fucking selfish"?
Is this country "free", as is claimed, or not?
None of us advocating for the rights and freedoms that we thought that we had are seeking to impinge on the freedoms of others to wear one, two, or twenty masks, isolate at home, avoid work, or adopt any other measure that makes them feel better.
I tend not to hang around large crowds anyway, or spend one more minute shopping than absolutely necessary, and have no personal problem wearing masks in public if it makes others feel better so none of this has had much effect upon me, but more and more people are coming to see endlessly-repetitive, inconsistent, illogical lockdowns as harmful shams. Protests are growing in size, and Doug Ford was forced to back down from two of his recent edicts. Seeing police forces refuse to go along was particularly heartening. Ontario is, though, for some bizarre reason, the only province or state in North America to ban golf (unless that's been lifted now as well and I missed it). I think that it is a silly game, but believe that golfers should be able to enjoy their ball-whacking. It's
outdoors, after all.
Now, about that mask-effectiveness thing: I've been saving articles and links that I feel relevant for sometime, and was pretty sure that I had saved a few that support that. One was a meta-analysis, which I cannot find. I'll keep looking for that one tonight.
In the meantime:
www.cidrap.umn.edu
Many countries across the globe utilized medical and non-medical facemasks as non-pharmaceutical intervention for reducing the transmission and infectivity of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Although, scientific evidence supporting facemasks’ ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The use of surgical facemasks is ubiquitous in surgical practice. Facemasks have long been thought to confer protection to the patient from wound infection and contamination from the operating surgeon and other members of the surgical staff. More ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of cloth masks to medical masks in hospital healthcare workers (HCWs). The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between medical masks and cloth masks.14 secondary-level/tertiary-level hospitals ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
In light of new, more transmissible variants of SARS-CoV-2, Elisabeth Mahase examines what kinds of mask the public should be wearing, and where they should be worn Early in the pandemic, major problems in the global supply of medical grade masks meant that the public was asked to avoid using...
www.bmj.com
There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol...
www.rcreader.com
I remain, as I said, no longer convinced that they have any real benefit. I still have nothing against wearing one.