You math guys always mess up the assumptions. Again it’s why they don’t trust you with the big decisions. Just because you have a50% (which is laughable…no one has found that) individual basis does not mean it scales to a population basis. The micro is actually an incidence count. The MACRO IS FOR THE VERY REASON YOU OUTLINE: repeated exposures and (the variable you ALWAYS miss time and time again…little pun) time. It’s called the scaling problem in economics. There’s also the imperfections curve (that as you scale little errors creep in like people not wearing masks properly). You’ve just disproven your own beliefs, you don’t even realize it, and because of your blind faith you don’t even see itCan we discuss things without going off on tangents? We start talking about the difference between individual and population scale protections. The next paragraph, you’re discussing the fact that the mayor of SF is a self-absorbed twit. Ok. She’s a twit. Can we stay on topic?
As I said, you have it backwards.
A 50% reduction to transmission doesn’t mean much to an individual suffering repeated exposure over a prolonged period. Eventually, you get unlucky.
A 50% reduction to transmission for a population is the difference between a disease that goes nowhere and a disease which doubles every 2 weeks.
More simply, masks are minorly effective on an individual scale, but reasonable effective on a population scale.
What you do with that information is up to you.
you are like mr Pitt staring at the 3D painting right now.