What if we had an affordable, comfortable mask that worked so well that you have no practical chance of contracting an airborne virus while wearing it? I get that current N95 and surgical masks are not that, but I don't see why it would be impossible to create one within the physical laws of the universe, especially if you put power and air supplies on the table. Scuba gear and air-supplied biohazard suits seem to be existence proofs, the question is whether they can be made practical.
If everyone had such a mask, we would have a new strategy available for controlling delta and any other variant that emerges in the future: everyone could mask up full-time when outside the house _for a limited amount of time_ until transmission drops to a low level. From that point, local outbreaks could be controlled by local bouts of masking, plus aggressive testing and contact tracing.
I get that anti-masking would be an obstacle, but part of the difficulty has been messaging risk and uncertainty to people who start from a skeptical place. A mask that _positively_ protects the wearer, and that can remove the need for restrictions within a finite, predictable time, would be an easier sell, especially after the strategy is seen to work once or twice.
1: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
2: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...