I have been thinking about masks for years.
It started when I began riding motorcycles in 1992. I felt claustrophobic under a full face mask, but I did not want to breathe dust, bugs, and agricultural poisons.
So I have been musing about masks for years — as a problem to be solved: could a good mask be made?
Now, I have not done a lot of research, but I have done some. I have even drawn up plans for effective mask/respiration technology. Fortunately, I live in the country, and the poisons of city life don’t make themselves obvious to my nostrils. And I don’t have heavy allergies. So I gave up on mask R&D.
Enter the current super-flu, COVID-19. And the mask mandates. People say they are concerned. But the masks people actually use range from plausible-but-ineffective to the wildly ineffective. And people routinely wear the masks they have in ineffective ways.
If anyone really thought that masking could work to prevent plague, and that the current contagion is as dangerous as they say it is, I would encounter at least a few people using their “masks” effectively and then going the next step, innovating to the gold standard of mask tech: full sealed head mask, separate filters for air intake and outgassing, and forced air with fans.
Though such tech is available, I have not seen anyone use it. Not one. Zip. Nada.
People “believe” in the pandemic like Christmas & Easter Christians “believe” in Christ.
Or else they are really, really stupid.
Suckers. Fools. Cowards. Such are Americans today.
I wear masks out of courtesy to cowards. And thus am implicated in cowardice, too.
We are not a serious people.
twv
Wirkman Comment 
While people do not recognize themselves as wearing masks as talismans, that is what most people attempting to reduce the spread of disease with masks are doing.
More generally, this situation has been about the ruling class cultivating and making use of popular neurosis.
Yes. And this is troubling, no?