Being sarcastic.
At one time studies proved steroids didn’t work, but people taking steroids knew they worked because they’re size was evidence.
Like studies that prove masks do not work, but people on the front lines dealing with it every day are not getting sick in near the percentage like the normal population. And what even proves the point that masks work to an extent more, is that the average person is not subjected to high viral loads every day for hours at a time.
So I was being sarcastic, Newf has been in 1000’s of these high risk situations and not caught covid. I wonder what would happen if next week he didn’t wear a mask, and neither dud the infected what would happen?
Ah yeah.
Yet its fallacious reasoning because you can never prove a negative or discover a fundamental cause that way. Only create theories.
Like they used to think it was 'night air' that caused malaria, and if you blocked out all the night air malaria incidence
was reduced.... go figure.
or a more modern example, arthroscopic surgery for knee arthritis turns out to be no better than a sham placebo surgery.
Should we continue to spend money on them because frontline doctors say "they work" based on patient satisfaction? (just not any better than placebo)
There are dozens of examples of things that were taken for granted as obvious truths before they were scrutinized and tested.
Bed rest post heart attack, killed many for instance.
Perhaps Newf does get contaminated all the time, but happens to have a great immune system? This creates a survivorship bias that further confounds efforts to discover what actually works and why. Maybe he does something unique and it's not the mask providing the bulk of the protection?.... I dunno, could be anything.. has anyone seen the evidence that smokers are 3 times less likely to be hospitalized with Covid?
If I was face to face with a covid patient spewing aerosols, I'd be wearing whatever was available too.
Hell, I'd wear an SCBA hazmat suit all day and be protected for sure.
But it's about determining what the risk actually is, and what provides the best benefit/risk ratio in reducing it. It's impossible to discover for sure what those things might be without a consistently applied method to test them.
If next week Newfs mask was swabbed and found to have covid virus on the inside, what would happen?
Throw away the masks, or get better ones?
Final note,
Studies and Science never prove anything, they can only disprove. Science is never settled, that is something only politicians say.
Everything we know, we know is wrong to some degree. The scientific method is used to make us just a little less wrong tomorrow than we were yesterday, and we do the best we can with what we've got in the meantime.
Like Feynman said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”