Comment by lexandstuff

Your first link is agreeing with me. "Wang et al. review recent advances ... The authors suggest that airborne transmission may be the dominant form of transmission for several respiratory pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2" (airborne transmission here means not via droplets but gaseous clouds of the type that just go around or through masks). Anyway.

Case study: Diamond Princess was a cruise ship at sea (i.e. sealed environment) in which the SARS-CoV-2 index case passenger was found very early. They locked everyone in their cabins and food was left outside the doors. This was an effective way to eliminate contact.

Implication: If SARS-CoV-2 spread only via respiratory droplets, that strategy would have killed the epidemic in its tracks.

Observed behavior: COVID cases appeared randomly throughout the entire ship without rhyme or reason, until eventually it petered out having sickened many but not all of the people on board.

Conclusion: SARS-CoV-2 is just like SARS-1, infected patients create gaseous aerosols which can spread long distances through air ducts. Exposure on board was 100%, but some people were naturally immune due to having been exposed to similar viral proteins in the past.

External validity: mask wearing and lockdowns routinely went from 0% to 100% to 0% again overnight, and yet no impacts can be seen in derivatives of the case rates. As creating such inflections in the derivative was the sole justification for the policies, these policies failed. Contact tracing studies estimated a maybe 80% pre-existing immunity rate to the initial variants based on lack of household transmission.

Why does the real data conflict with so many post-2020 studies? Check the details and you'll find the ones claiming masks work are all pseudo-scientific. Many of them don't even use real world evidence at all, they're purely modeling exercises in which academics start by assuming masks work and then show a reduction in simulated infection rate! Such papers have no scientific validity, it's merely writing a video game that reflects your own beliefs back at you.

If you narrow it down to just studies that use the scientific method correctly and which are built on strong evidence, no convincing findings remain. That was the conclusion of the Cochrane Review, and it was the scientific consensus before COVID too. You know, when the health officials started out by saying (everywhere, globally) that there was no evidence masks worked, it wasn't really some enormously cunning global conspiracy to limit demand. Use Google Scholar and see for yourself.

The switch to claiming masks worked came about because epidemiologists built models that shocked the world with their predictions of mass death and crisis. Lots of people became so terrified they'd barely leave their homes. Politicians and Public Health needed a way to talk people down from the ledge so this idea of mask mandates came, but it came from the politicians. Politicians: "Do masks work?", PH: "We have no evidence they would", "But would masks hurt?", "Well.... no ... guess they can't really hurt ...", "OK then this is a crisis, let's do it". And then public health suddenly had to justify this new position, so you get a proliferation of "studies" along with ridiculous stories like "we were lying to save masks for healthcare workers" (think about the nonsensical logic of this for a second!)