It's not just about protection, it's also about preventing people that are sick and asymptomatic from spreading.
>but the latter are so uncomfortable that they cause people to touch their face more
The logic just doesn't work here, you can't touch your face if you have a mask on and N95 respirators aren't as unconformable as you claim, if anything they are often higher quality and the cheap elastic bands on surgical masks are more uncomfortable on the ears.
>That’s why all the videos we see in Asia just have crowds wearing flimsy surgical masks
It's because they can't get N95 masks. No one wears a mask for comfort.
> clinicians will likely get much closer to someone
> patients are much more likely to have an infection
Most of the spread is from people that are asymptomatic.
You don't know who has the virus or not.
So if the argument here is that doctors and nurses are at higher risk, and need more protection, then my counter argument is that you don't know what the risk is simply because people can be asymptomatic.
Secondly, masks a very effective at preventing already sick people from spreading the disease. Given the vast majority cases are asymptomatic and the infected don't even know they are sick, if everyone had masks it would dramatically reduce spread from the asymptomatic.
Even an improperly worn mask is better than no mask.
It's not about achieving 100% perfect protection, it's about some protection.
Even if somebody pulled down their mask to sneeze, if everyone else had masks on then it won't be as big of a deal.
Having used webRTC with the TURN server REST API (multimedia conferencing app), it's not that bad.
STUN will get though the NAT most of the times. With the latest browsers, Firefox to Chromium is a bit dodgy, but there are workarounds. But Chromium to Chromium is perfectly fine.