Reasons

I'll admit to being a touch surprised by the fact that "They assist in public health" somehow didn't make the cut. Because, as much as I think that most masks don't do much to limit the spread of airborne respiratory diseases, that was kind of the point of wearing them. I suppose that is may be assumed, but I think that I wouldn't have left is as as assumption, given how polarizing an issue it became.

Most of the face masks available these days are what are termed breath deflectors; the basic point is to stop the direct transfer of air from a potentially infected person to a presumably uninfected person. And so wearing masks, on the assumption that one was infectious, became a substitute for actually knowing whether or not one was infected.

And that created something of a paradox. Personally, if I suspected that I might be carrying a potentially fatal respiratory infection, showing people that I cared for them would entail completely staying the heck away from them. After all, breath deflectors (and all of the masks I have fall into this category) don't prevent exhaling pathogens; they simply prevent one from blowing them more or less directly into someone else's face. And so a lot of masking worked under the convoluted premise that one was infectious enough that one shouldn't breathe on another person, but not so infectious that doing one's best to remain isolated was called for.

For me, this contributed to a sense that masking was primarily a form of public health theater; the important thing was to be seen doing it, to be seen showing that one cared, rather than actually understanding the circumstances. Of course, with the public health infrastructure (or lack thereof) in the various states, ubiquitous testing was never going to happen; once things fell behind, there was no catching up. And eventually the project was simply abandoned. Maybe that's where things went wrong.