In Australia, we didn't bother with the masks and my state hasn't has a new case in.....well..... dunno when but our death total was only 6. We adhered to the 1.5metre distancing and it was supposed by authorities that masks might make us complacent when it came to social distancing. Still, I realise it is far easier to keep distance from one another in Australia than London.

Lets be straight about this. At the beginning of the pandemic, the UK government discovered that it did not have enough PPE for all its hospital staff. So in order to stop the public panic buying PPE and making demands on the manufacturers, it put out the line that masks were of no use, even dangerous, because it did not trust the public, and therefore it chose to lie rather than tell the truth. (Funny how they work in hospitals but not in shops.)

And in order to justify that, they carefully cherry picked their pseudo-science, and willfully chose to ignore information coming out of responsible organizations like the W.H.O.. (They may have found a scientist who had spent the last six years in Antarctica studying penguins, and they asked him if he had found any evidence that face masks lessen the risk of viral transmission. To which he said. "No." ) Some GPs may have gone along with this or been taken in, or brow beaten into pulling the government line.

The government then, when the PPE crisis was over, then went into a face saving mode, by trying to downplay the value of them. Which act of petty ego, has no doubt cost lives and done huge economic damage by prolonging and deepening the problem , and is truly shameful.

You do not have to be super intelligent, (though for all I know Caprise may be highly intelligent,) to see that physical barriers are going to reduce the transmission of particles by air, that has nothing to do with medicine, it just basic Newtonian physics.