I’m confused by your framing. Masks are neither perfect nor costless, and I never suggest zinc is a total cure alleviating the need for any other. But your phrasing very strongly implies that one must choose one, and that N95s have been conclusively proven superior.
They sound exclusive because they are valuable for the same reasons but if one gets you most of the gains, it is unlikely the other one is then also worthwhile at the new margin. (If you have a working belt, do you really need suspenders?) It seems like going by all of the details you list, a N95 is strictly superior to zinc lozenges:
The weak research on zinc is not an issue for masks, which have evidence from COVID now, in addition to the fundamental mechanistic plausibility of masks filtering particles of airborne illness that would be infecting your mouth.
Masks are even more broad spectrum: presumably zinc’s mechanism works for only some viruses/bacteria, but masks physically filter out everything.
You raise a lot of alarming points about getting the wrong kind of zinc, or using it wrong, or side-effects from such large amounts of nutritionally-unnecessary zinc, suggesting that even if it does work in experiments, it won’t work for you. Masks, in contrast, seem a lot more foolproof. (I don’t need to worry about ‘depleting copper’ when I wear my P100 mask.)
Masks are much cheaper: following the first link I noticed, I see a bottle for 30 lozenges at $9; a N95 mask is <$1 and good indefinitely, so has paid for itself after 4 pills’ equivalent. If you’ve gone through 3 or 4 packs, then you have paid for a better P100 mask which you can then use everywhere else too.
You describe the experience as being physically unpleasant: taking a large pill (itself very difficult for quite a few people) and holding it and letting the nasty zinc coat your mouth. I’m not a fan of masks, but their discomfort and inconvenience is much less than zinc sounds like.
So, it sounds like masks buy you most of the feasible risk reduction at a small cost, and then use of zinc buys you a reduction in a now-small-absolute risk at a high relative cost; it sounds unlikely that the zinc is worthwhile. Further, as you do not mention already masking all of the time, or using even better masks (like someone would who is serious about not getting infected rather than merely complying with norms), that implies you do not put that high a value on not being infected and thus any benefits from reductions, making it even more unlikely that the small benefit of zinc justifies its costs.
N95s are, at a rough guess, significantly more effective, and have the massive benefit of not being something you put in your body, which can go wrong a lot of ways (the claimed loss of taste side effect, or just general mild dysfunction)
I’m confused by your framing. Masks are neither perfect nor costless, and I never suggest zinc is a total cure alleviating the need for any other. But your phrasing very strongly implies that one must choose one, and that N95s have been conclusively proven superior.
They sound exclusive because they are valuable for the same reasons but if one gets you most of the gains, it is unlikely the other one is then also worthwhile at the new margin. (If you have a working belt, do you really need suspenders?) It seems like going by all of the details you list, a N95 is strictly superior to zinc lozenges:
The weak research on zinc is not an issue for masks, which have evidence from COVID now, in addition to the fundamental mechanistic plausibility of masks filtering particles of airborne illness that would be infecting your mouth.
Masks are even more broad spectrum: presumably zinc’s mechanism works for only some viruses/bacteria, but masks physically filter out everything.
You raise a lot of alarming points about getting the wrong kind of zinc, or using it wrong, or side-effects from such large amounts of nutritionally-unnecessary zinc, suggesting that even if it does work in experiments, it won’t work for you. Masks, in contrast, seem a lot more foolproof. (I don’t need to worry about ‘depleting copper’ when I wear my P100 mask.)
Masks are much cheaper: following the first link I noticed, I see a bottle for 30 lozenges at $9; a N95 mask is <$1 and good indefinitely, so has paid for itself after 4 pills’ equivalent. If you’ve gone through 3 or 4 packs, then you have paid for a better P100 mask which you can then use everywhere else too.
You describe the experience as being physically unpleasant: taking a large pill (itself very difficult for quite a few people) and holding it and letting the nasty zinc coat your mouth. I’m not a fan of masks, but their discomfort and inconvenience is much less than zinc sounds like.
So, it sounds like masks buy you most of the feasible risk reduction at a small cost, and then use of zinc buys you a reduction in a now-small-absolute risk at a high relative cost; it sounds unlikely that the zinc is worthwhile. Further, as you do not mention already masking all of the time, or using even better masks (like someone would who is serious about not getting infected rather than merely complying with norms), that implies you do not put that high a value on not being infected and thus any benefits from reductions, making it even more unlikely that the small benefit of zinc justifies its costs.
N95s are, at a rough guess, significantly more effective, and have the massive benefit of not being something you put in your body, which can go wrong a lot of ways (the claimed loss of taste side effect, or just general mild dysfunction)