I saw so many studies that showed that a properly fitted mask makes a massive difference in how protective it is compared to other mask types. Where can I get a mask fitted? Never even saw anything about fitting masks other than "it makes a huge difference and we do this for nurses".

Clearly much of the air goes around the mask. Sure a little metal piece at the bridge of the nose makes this a little better, but why did nobody seem to work on a proper solution for this? How about a mask with a rubber seal that goes around it?

This kind of stuff could have saved thousands of lives, yet we seem to not even have tried.

I think the fatality of COVID was just right to create a societal mess. Fatal enough to kill tons of people. But not fatal enough to get everyone on the same page that some sacrifices need to be made to rein it in. At the same time some people also had practically no symptoms, creating more opportunity for disagreement.

Both of these factors were improvable even by small measures that don't prevent infection but just reduce the severity or probability, slowing down ("flattening the curve") the pandemic and postponing more of the cases till later when there was more capacity as well as better treatment knowledge.

As someone who suffered a lot in 2021 due to an illness that was totally unrelated to covid, but that was only so bad because of insufficient medical care available due to the pandemic (literally, some simple better care and tests earlier on would have definitely caught and resolved it, but getting care during the pandemic was a shitshow), I take this aspect quite seriously. I think covid was best understood as a crisis for the medical system than for individuals (relatively speaking)

EDIT: fwiw I'm not even disagreeing with you on anything (yes, on HN, I know), just riffing :)

Did I miss an instance where it worked well enough to be worth the effort?

Add in the fact that the gay community has reasons to be less than thrilled with medical disclosure of this sort and I'm not the least bit surprised.

It's obvious isn't it? Handwashing isn't a badge you can wear. Meet somebody in public and you'll know if they're wearing a mask or not, but you won't know if they've washed their hands recently.

Because you seem to mean it as "prevents 100% of transmission", and therefore anything less than that means masking isn't effective.

And that's simply untrue. Masking does, really, truly, assist with covid spread. It doesn't prevent 100% of transmission, because nothing does, especially something that requires active participation, but yeah it helps a lot if people actually do it.

It's likely a large part of the reason that I've never caught covid, despite a fairly active social life and continued in-person office work for almost a year now. And why the social events I attend, where you can have a hundred people in close quarters breathing on each other haven't had recorded transmissions, despite recorded isolated cases.

> It causes many accessibility problems, it causes childhood development problems, it causes social strife (including discrimination), it enables abusive policing, and so forth.

There's no evidence for any of these claims, and in fact you'll find the accessibility community strongly favors masks as immunocompromised people exist. Widespread seasonal masking has been common in other countries for decades (since SARS-1, two decades ago), and there's no evidence that it causes childhood development issues. There's, like, one academic paper whose conclusion is that mask wearing makes it difficult for preschoolers to detect the emotion of a person wearing a mask. But any extension of that to impacts on childhood psychological development isn't academic, it's you making things up.

I ask this as a gay man with some awareness of the history of AZT.

Assuming he is a young man, then caution for the first few months meant he was cautious until mortality statistics revealed that the risk to himself, and presumably his partners, was minimal.