Plane etiquette… lurgy

Read the Cochrane study, which takes all those studies and tries to make sense of it.

Basically, in the real world, with real people, doing real things, masks make no difference... Even early days of the pandemic that was a known thing that they wouldn't make any difference. If you've ever worked in a medical setting there is specific doffing and donning of masks and other PPE, which will never happen in the wild.

As a nurse friend of mine pointed out, to make them effective doing the weekly shop you would;

1. Have someone in full PPE handing out correctly sanitized masks on entry
2. If you touch your face or mask at any point during the shop, you would need to return to the start, decontaminate, re don a new mask and start again
3. At the end, be stripped of relevant PPE by someone else to then incinerate all wasted material

In the end it was a "shown to be doing something and give everyone a sense they can contribute" that won out for the mask mandates.

Obviously, YMMV