I appreciate you sending the source. I guess I still have the same argument. A LOT less effective does not equal ineffective. Or maybe I just see certain words like "ineffective" as binary words, either it works or it doesn't, and have a reaction to that. It may be a lot less effective to have facial hair while wearing an n95 compared to no facial hair and a properly fit n95, but is that still much much more effective than not wearing any face mask?
ineffective is not binary - it depends on your endpoint, which is subjective.
If your endpoint is to not catch covid and someone ineffectively wears their mask such that they would not have caught covid if they wore it correctly - then the mask was ineffective even if statistically they _maybe_ had lower chances of catching covid than without wearing a mask at all.
and I say maybe very strongly here...we do not understand transmissible diseases nearly as well as many would like to think - there are plenty of observable datapoints that correlate mask usage with increased transmission...my gut feeling would be to explain those away with confounding variables, but my gut feeling is not science and no substitute for a testable understanding of the problem and solution
Ah, yeah, I think it was just a misalignment on the word ineffective. I think when I hear many people use it, I assume they mean pointless, ineffective for all, whereas in you saying it, it sounds like you meant ineffective in that particular instance based on what the outcome was. I see you seem to have a lot more nuance in your perspective than I may had been assuming. I'm sorry. Thank you for clarifying.
