I believe you are correct here.

As for the mask wearing … well, I’m an American so my thoughts on that tend to be twofold. There shouldn’t be mask mandates being enforced and punishable by law when you have an obvious problem with police brutality. Besides, you can have a nonpunative mandate that gets the message out without putting burrs in people’s saddles.

Secondly, you shouldn’t need to have a mask mandate anyway. People who want freedom should choose of their own accord actions that guarantee the preservation of that freedom. Like responsibly, within reason, wearing a mask during a pandemic instead of strutting around bloviating about concepts they clearly don’t fully understand just because it’s an opportunity to show off exactly how much of a douchebag they are.

Whether or not masks are effective isn’t really the point. Or rather, it’s only one pixel point of an image that contains a great many pixel points of consideration. You have to see the whole picture before you know whether it’s worth it, whether it helps more or harms more. In the case of mask wearing, I think it’s pretty clear that they help significantly more than they harm.

And again, pandemics are temporary. So mask wearing isn’t going to be a forever thing.