When the Covid-19 pandemic started, the medical community at large was of the opinion that using masks is over-reaction and unnecessary, and that, on the contrary, people should avoid hoarding masks because they are needed by medical staff. Then a flood of masks appeared on the market somehow, and suddenly the opinion of the worldwide medical community reversed, and they started strongly recommending the use of masks to slow down the spread of the disease.
Regardless of whether you think that masks do work and are very important, or they don't work and are completely useless, one has to wonder: Are there actual scientific studies about the efficacy of surgical masks in slowing down the spread of a highly contagious pathogen like the coronavirus?
One would think that these past two years would have been the absolutely optimal time to make such studies. Sample sizes could be absolutely humongous. This would be the golden opportunity to actually test if masks work, in a real-life situation, with a real pandemic.
Yet, surprisingly and astonishingly, there are no such studies.
There do exist a few studies that do examine the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of contagious diseases, but they are very old (many years before Covid-19) and their sample sizes are absolutely minuscule, and they weren't really testing real-life conditions out there, during a real pandemic. (The studies are more focused on whether masks work in clinical settings eg. in hospitals.)
This is actually quite surprising. We have been told for well over a year that masks do work, and that they are extremely important and life-saving. Yet, there seems to be very little backing these claims up. The claims seem to be based more on perception and guessing than actual real scientific studies and data. Even the few studies that exist are, as mentioned, very old, with small sample sizes and not performed in pandemic-like conditions.
I'm not saying that masks do not work or that they don't slow down the spread of the disease. What I am saying is that I find it quite surprising how little evidence there is corroborating this claim. The claim seems to be based more on perception and belief rather than hard scientific data.
(One of the most common arguments for the efficacy of masks is that if they weren't effective why would surgeons use them? This is quite an invalid comparison because the setting where surgeons use the masks is extraordinarily different from real-life settings. They are mostly using the masks in extremely sterile and controlled operating rooms, and their main purpose is to avoid any saliva droplets from the medical staff dropping onto the patient by accident. Also, on average they are used for a relatively small amount of time for each operated patient, as surgical operations, on average, are not long. Hours-long surgical operations are relatively rare, and most often they tend to take less than 15 minutes.)
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