With mask - 3% infection   Without mask 17% infection

Meaningless.

Here in Cornwall there is no mask-wearing culture, so most people are clearly stubborn, accidental people-killers. You have to wear them on buses (which are as rare around here as rocking horse shit anyway) and trains (nearest railway an hour's drive away) and if you go the doctor or hospital. The nurse at our medical centre gave me a sort of papery mask that she said I can use over and over again. I'm puzzling over the hygiene aspect of that, even though I'm an assiduously hygienic sort of chap myself. Two days ago in Morrisons a mask-wearing woman brushed past me to get a bag of frozen peas. Yep, made physical contact. I've had a fair number of similar and unwelcome close-ups like that with mask-wearers. Mask-wearers are far more likely to ignore the other cautions, it seems to me, though I haven't done any counts. You see masks worn under the nose, etc. If they make masks compulsory, yet don't give people loads of free masks, a lot of people are going to reuse masks that they shouldn't be reusing. There plenty of negatives that you mask-zealots are ignoring. Oh, and by the way, this county, full of those stubborn accidental people-killers, has the lowest infection rate in the country. We don't know of anyone who has had the disease and neither does anyone else we know. Well, we did hear of an outbreak in a care home 30 miles from here...

I am not anti-mask. A couple of you are so pro-mask that your posts are beginning to sound a bit evangelical. The fact is that the efficacy of masks in many settings is questionable. There are downsides, some dangerous, that you are ignoring. I don't laugh at people who wear masks and I'll wear a mask when I'm ordered to do so, and I'll do it properly. The case for the defence rests.