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Notes -
The Cochrane meta-review contains 12 studies, only 2 of which are covid-specific. Those 2 studies are https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 which says
and https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817, reporting that
That's 1 positive and 1 neutral study, with the positive study having a much, much larger sample size; based on https://www.stat.ubc.ca/~rollin/stats/ssize/b2.html the neutral study is only about 30% powered to detect a decrease from 2% to 1.5% infection rate.
In addition, all of these studies are really testing the combined effectiveness of masks against COVID, and whether various measures to get people to wear masks actually do so, and the baseline level of mask wearing. For example, the latter study I quoted above says
and the former has the adherence levels in the passage I quoted.
Obviously you can't do a meta-analysis with 2 studies, which is why Cochrane grouped these 2 in with the other 10, but "By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19." is simply not true. In some cases an individual study is more reliable evidence than a meta-analysis, and this is probably one of those cases.
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