Masks are the thing you do if you cannot socially distance. We have good evidence for social distancing, we don't yet (for a variety of reasons) have good evidence for mask wearing.
You point to South Korea, and then claim it's the masks. But there's a bunch of other stuff they're also doing (because of their experience with coronaviruses): earlier lockdown, harder lockdown, much better test trace and isolate programmes, more social adherence to prevention measures such as hand washing and distancing and mask wearing, people with symptoms choosing to self-isolate, travel restrictions, etc.
You need all of it at the same time, but especially distancing.
This broadly supports what you're saying. Their success has been due to many rigorous and (near?) universally adopted protocols, not just mask wearing.
Yeah, and they take all the camera data from CCTV and all the mobile phone data, as well as the contact tracing data (with QR codes to a central system) and use that for contact tracing.
They are trading off liberty for security, and it seems to be working out well for them.
I can only imagine how crazy the US would have gone if the government had tried to do any of this.
You point to South Korea, and then claim it's the masks. But there's a bunch of other stuff they're also doing (because of their experience with coronaviruses): earlier lockdown, harder lockdown, much better test trace and isolate programmes, more social adherence to prevention measures such as hand washing and distancing and mask wearing, people with symptoms choosing to self-isolate, travel restrictions, etc.
You need all of it at the same time, but especially distancing.