This doesn't look like quite such good advice now that the Bangladesh study is out (https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_Second_Stage_Paper_20211108.pdf.pdf).

The Bangladesh results are a bit messy in full, due to pretty wide confidence bounds, but the expectation is that an increase in surgical mask wearing from about 1 in 7 to about 3 in 7, with lots of re-use of masks, decreases COVID rates about 11%. Since the impact of masks is roughly quadratic (as they both reduce spread of virus and the propensity to inhale it, though the former is generally thought to be more important), we can solve algebraically for a rough "mask risk coefficient" of about 0.8 under "in vivo" conditions, applied both when wearing and when around people wearing masks (for a maximum difference of ~0.64 attack rate).

(For unclear reasons, it seemed to make a much bigger difference for older individuals, with an estimated mask risk coefficient of 0.4 and a max attack rate reduction to 0.16. Note also the "mask risk coefficient" is my calculation, not something found in the paper, in part because unless effects are very small, this sort of quadratic extrapolation of effect size is at odds with viral spread.)

It's not amazing, but it's on a societal level, it's pretty important when your R value is hovering a bit over 1.

This also is consistent with why the state data doesn't look like anything: there are too many other factors for the signal to be clear. And why Texas doesn't look like anything: R0 was already plenty low (and anyway, Texas was never the kind of place to jump between 100% and 0% compliance).

And if you might end up accidentally causing me serious harm or death, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable for me to want you to take a pretty low-effort action that might reduce that by ~20%, is it?

(However, I agree that the focus on "wear a mask, any mask" rather than "let's carefully evaluate the effectiveness of different masks" is exactly not following the science...heck, we hardly even managed to get funding together to properly do the science.)