Literally, if every single person starting today, wears a mask when they are within 15 feet of another person, and all the time indoors, this virus would be gone from the entire United States in 2 months. No additional shutdown needed.
It's a lot harder for the virus to make it through two masks (the one on the sick person is the especially important one) and it seems if you don't get a exposed to a high enough viral load at the start, you don't get it nearly as bad.
I think universal mask wearing would bring R0 below 1, and the pandemic would end.
Costco requires a mask to shop in their stores (at least where I am.) If you don't have one, they will give you one (and an admonition to save it for the next visit.) I feel safer shopping there than any other store right now.
For example, I am avoiding Walmart and hardware stores because almost nobody wears a mask, including even the staff, whereas in Target and Kroger it is 50% or higher.
Recently McDonald's actually removed the sneeze guards they had installed for some inexplicable reason and their staff stopped wearing masks, and in a related note due to increasing numbers we're likely to re-enter lock-down soon (per the state health board).
I cannot imagine any justification for EVER removing the sneeze guards, it isn't like flu and the common cold are disappearing. Let alone now.
We went to a Costco in Toronto, Canada a couple of days ago. If you didn't have a mask on, they pointed you at a table off to the side where they had free masks, hand sanitizer, etc. Some people would accept the free mask, but others went in maskless. A staffer at the front door appeared to be keeping tally of people without masks using a sheet of paper (as opposed to the standard front door person who counts everyone going in with a little clicker thing).
I'd say about 15-20% of people in the store weren't wearing masks.
What's wrong with Western culture where people are making a political thing out of wearing a mask, I.e. Not being a dick and looking out for the health of the people around you.
What you want is masks + distance. The mask is really a stop-gap measure when keeping distance fails.
Also: gloves.
That being said, even used incorrectly they would definitely drastically help.
Losing ten percent of three nines is huge, losing ten percent of coin flip reliability is negligible. (but a coin flip reduction in everyday infection rates would still be huge). I strongly believe that unnecessary fretting over clinical hygiene rules of mask handling is responsible for a massive adoption delay, or adoption gap even today.
Of course, yes, it would be easy to say, "just never get in range and the mask doesn't matter," but we live in urban environments and need to do the best we can in light of that.
They're not wrong. Enacting pro-social policies that restrict most individuals in small ways—but benefit society-as-a-whole in large ways—is one of the core things Fascists did that was actually effective at improving lives—just like forcing everyone to wear masks in the United States would also be effective at improving lives.
So yeah, Fascists would absolutely have forced individuals to wear masks for the good of everyone—but that doesn't make the policy "bad", it's just one of the rare policy areas where Fascists tend to get good results.
The actual problem is that people today believe literally anything Fascists would have done is, by definition, "bad/wrong/evil." That kind of simplistic thinking is all too common.
Societies of all stripes and sorts restrict individuals in small ways. Just because fascism restricts individual freedoms doesn't mean that all restrictions are a symptom of fascism.
Conflating mask requirements with fascism is to ignore the real history and motivations behind fascist movements.
Lots of similar policies are promoted by seemingly different forms of government. Even the most cursory inspection of our world today (or history) is sufficient to demonstrate this point.
Forcing individuals to wear masks is absolutely something Fascists would do, and they would do so for 100% ideological reasons, so the statement "forcing people to wear masks is a Fascist policy" is 100% accurate. It's also a current US policy, a current communist policy, etc. etc. so it's clearly not limited just to Fascists.
And no, it isn't "current US policy" whatever that would mean. There's no Federal law requiring it, and many states explicitly prohibit requiring it; for example, Nebraska blocks cities and counties from receiving funds if they refuse to provide service to people who refuse masks.
And how do you know Fascists would do so for 100% ideological reasons? You have this simplistic boogeyman idea of fascism. Fascists don't want to die from COVID-19 any more than anyone else does.
The mask issue really shows both how anti-science people are, and how easy it is for people to politicize a simple method for fighting disease.
Do you object to laws preventing you from dumping your raw sewage in the street? Fascism at work!