yeah, and I'm asking you how those links show that masks are not the answer. They don't even mention masks once. If you're telling me masks are not the only answer, then I agree. But masks are part of the answer.

Yes we are concerned about stopping deaths from covid. How do we ensure that covid deaths do not happen - by stopping the spread. Again, skipping over the whole conversation about "overweight people," I'm sure you agree it was not and was never only overweight people dying from covid. And even if it was, are you saying these people deserve to die? "Well, overweight people will die, but for everyone else it's just the flu so we shouldn't do anything."

Except it was never only overweight people dying, and even those who got covid and it only presented as a "mild flu" have dealt with long post-viral illness afterwards. Some people still dealing with post-viral illness from being infected in the first wave. So you also have to decide that you're okay with that.

I know nothing about Canada, but I don't understand your reasoning.

The hospitals in Canada were full and fucked way before covid, so a few extra admissions completely broke their fucked up system.

Okay, so you blame masks and lockdowns for that? That's exactly what lockdowns were supposed to mitigate - stop the spread so covid does not put more stress on an already overstressed system. We were dealing with the same thing here in the USA. So you admit covid stressed an overstressed system, but your solution is to...let covid spread more? Wouldn't that put more stress on hospitals. Or, as you say, well it only presents a mild flu for some. Okay...then why did it put so much stress on the hospitals in 2020 if it's not a big deal?

isolated physical tests on masks don’t represent well what happens in the real world.

Except those real world studies were all inconclusive. So we have mechanistic evidence that shows without a doubt that masks work, versus inconclusive rcts that need to be stretched by ideologues, beyond the conclusions of the authors, to maybe sort-of support that masks don't work.

I sure as hell wasn’t hermetically sealing the masks to my face and I didn’t see anyone else doing it either.

I did not have a mask that fit my face until just before the omicron wave. This was not a failure of masks. I argued to someone here (maybe you) that any mask is better than no mask. However, yes, some masks are better than others and if you're walking around in a loose fitting cloth mask you're getting very little protection, especially when no one else is taking any precaution. But, at least here in the US, we were first told that masks were unnecessary, then told we should wear a cloth mask, and then finally the baggy blue surgical masks were promoted, which was better but still inadequate. I don't know what it was like in Canada, but for us this was a failure of policy. There were contradictory statements, no real push to get people educated about masks, and of course poor masks were promoted. So you'd walk around seeing people wearing surgical masks below their nose, upside down. Then of course there was the issue where people were selling counterfeit masks, including n95s, that didn't work, so you had people also walking around with fake masks. And of course the whole issue at the start of the pandemic where we had a shortage of PPE.

There were a whole lot of policy disasters, many of which predated covid, but to blame masks and make the charge that they don't work because of those policy disasters makes no sense. Just in time manufacturing should never have been used to supply PPE, masks should have been promoted from the start (and "the start" should have been at least by early January, not March 15), and n95s should have been made easy to acquire with an education campaign to get people to wear them correctly. Instead we were all left on our own to try and sort through all the contradictory statements of the CDC and misinformation on the internet, fight with people at stores to even get a mask, do intensive research at home to figure out if your mask was even real, and then even once you did all that many people didn't even understand how to wear them. When I got an n95 finally it was late 2021 and I was working in a nursery school. As kids and teachers wearing loose fitting masks that they were extremely lax with began dropping like flies, I was getting tested weekly (because I was constantly exposed) and never got covid once. Masks work.