The viral particle needs a vehicle, does it not? The particle itself is smaller than the filter, but the particle is bonded to something larger
Okay, but does the volume of exposure matter? Or in simpler exaggerated terms, if I walk through a cloud of sneeze droplets from someone sick with Covid, am I at more risk than walking by someone asymptomatic and only releasing aerosol particles, all other things equal?
You're judging mask mandates with these last two points. Not interested.
Some do and some virus particles don't. In the case of covid it appears that individual covid particles can cause infection.
Yes the density of the individual covid particles in the air mattered. This is why outdoor transmission of covid was very rare and it mostly infected people indoors where you could be exposed to high concentrations of the airborne viral particles. But in a high density covid particle environment you're still dealing with individual particles passing through the mask.
BTW, after sneezing the water can evaporate very quickly leaving individual airborne covid particles in high density moving out from the person sneezing. Also coughing, especially a "dry" cough, often resulted in covid particles with little or no bodily fluids attached.
But the "why" the masks don't work for covid is less important then the FACT that the overwhelming scientific & medical evidence demonstrated that masking did not impact covid transmission. We know masking, even when masks were worn properly, didn't work.
Your last sentence is silly on it's face. A basic principal of good Public Health policy is to make sure your efforts are practical and that regular people can be reasonably expected to be compliant with your instructions. It's not reasonable to expect that in community wide masking there won't be a lot of people who fail to wear their masks correctly. And with an airborne respiratory viral outbreak it doesn't take a lot of people screwing up to cancel out the impact of your policy.