@n0mesorah You didn’t explain your original comment at all! And your points are absolutely not mutually exclusive.
I think you mistake in reasoning is the same one a lot of your crowd has been making. No one said that masks will “avert the threat” completely. Rather, masks are simply a major part of an equation that also includes social distancing, testing, and handwashing. So to combine your two statements into one that applied to the situation in 2020:
The threat of coronavirus in the past year to the wearer and those around him, is significantly more than other viruses. And masks helped avert the threat. Since it was a pandemic, a public health emergency, all lines of safety measures should be invoked to slow the disease as much as possible, and to prevent the collapse of societal structures. Therefore masks and other health and social distancing mandates were necessary.