You posted that after I asked the question, but OK. It's an opinion piece. As I've said many times, I prefer factual pieces to opinion pieces. That said, looking at the time of COVID, they were encouraging numerous measures to protect from infection because we didn't know, initially. Wipe down your shopping carts, leave your mail in the sun, wear masks. As we learned more, most of the fomite precautions were abandoned because that wasn't how it was transmitted. We didn't know that in March of 2020. The respiratory measures (masks) made logical sense. It's easier to look back and say that it was (or wasn't) effective. At the time, we had to use the best information we had.

In that opinion piece was a link to a meta analysis. I highlight part of the conclusion:
The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.

There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks.

They go on to say there was no clear benefit. Not that there was no benefit. Basically, they said they didn't know one way or the other, but they couldn't declare a positive result.

Even if there was clear evidence of lack of efficacy, this is in 2024. We now have data about mask-wearing, who died and who didn't, who got sick and who didn't, etc. Hindsight is 20/20. You have to do the best you can with the knowledge you have at any given time. At the absolute worst, masks did no harm (in terms of the virus). It did not make things worse, and was a logical precaution given the nature of the virus.

I do not begrudge them advising me to wipe down shopping carts, or put my mail in the sun for an hour, or wear a mask. Those bits of advice were the best they had at the time. Today, they wouldn't bother with the wipe-down or leaving the mail out in the sun. Four years (and a lot of learning) later. Anyone that claimed they knew better at the time is full of it. They didn't know. They couldn't have known. Nobody knew.

And I still don't have the answer to "location of what?". That opinion piece had nothing to do with geography.