It’s astonishing why anyone would continue to believe that they work. There’s no data to support it. I remember the arguments were about sneezing, coughing, and ‘droplets’. This thing is airborne and 1000x too small for cloth masks to stop. You’d think this was common knowledge, of course there’s a reason it isn’t.
When you also consider that people have masks they keep using, all while putting them on & off several times a day, means they’re touching something that is completely contaminated and spreading it to everything they touch all the time. It’s probably WORSE than just trying to not touch your face.
Yes, for the reasons you just stated, the masks are actually a vector for the virus.
Any medical professional who promotes masking as a way to control transmission of a respiratory virus has seriously damaged their credibility to dispense medical advice. That’s it!