And they still didn't work. Yeah, sneezing in your face is worse than having something in between. It is why we teach children to cover their mouths when they sneeze and cough.
That being said, there is nothing that supports that the masks did anything to slow and/or stop the spread of the virus. It still went through the population multiple times. The masks used were not the kind tested in most of these tests that show any type of benefit either. People were not wearing even what they wear at a dentist office, let alone surgical grade masks. They wore a piece of cloth.
What we forced people to do w.r.t. COVID masks did not work. It was mostly theater. And honestly the people who pushed the masks the hardest were ass holes about the whole thing. Whatever minimal effectiveness they may have had in short situations here and there was completely offset by the people who acted like this:
All that for something that was minimally effective for short periods of time (at best). Then after the masks it was the vaccine.
(That one is for
@IU_Hickory who is about the most misinformed poster on the board. He'll either respond with a 🤣 to this post or run away though.) People were fired from their jobs because of the absolute lie that people like Biden were spreading. "It's the science maaaaan." There was absolutely a sliding scale for what that "vaccine" (we had to change the definition of vaccines for the COVID shot, the left has us changing definitions on a bunch of things lately) was actually going to do for people. Then you would get gaslit by the same Karen's yelling at people in the first video about "that isn't what we said the vaccine would do." We. Have. The. Video. "Well the science changed..." Yeah it "changed" you absolute ****ing dicks. That is the point. Most of the dumbasses screaming about the "science" were using that as a silencing technique. The "science" changes, so ruining lives and acting like an absolute douche canoe over the "science" shows how little the Twitterati experts actually knew.
Same with the lab leak. Xenophobia. A conspiracy theory. And on and on. Now it is believed to be the most likely explanation for the virus.
The problem wasn't with the masks per se, it was with everything that came along with it.