It's the same argument I hear a lot: if I can smell something, then I can be infected by a virus. It assumes I am smelling droplets of something. But that's not correct, I can smell molecules which are 1000 times smaller than any droplet.
even N95 type masks are worthless in smoke
Due to the volatile molecules, not the particles. You will die in a burning house with an N95 mask, no doubt about that. Here's how: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2396464/ Bottom line: various gases can kill you (100 times smaller than the virus) and particles containing acids and other toxins. Some of those particles would be stopped by some masks although the article doesn't go into that.
Parts of this statement are not completely accurate, but I have done a poor job trying to explain why... it really does not matter, and I do not have the energy to go into it again. So I started my post by saying that I did not believe we disagreed on anything of substance. I wasn't making an argument, I was trying to add validity to your points as a conciliatory gesture. I am sorry that my post was not clear enough to make this obvious to you.
I was a the senior officer in charge of a big city Hazmat team for many years. We drilled with teams from the military, other municipalities, and had instructors with various backgrounds from all over the country teaching continuing education. Myself and most of the members of my team had more than just a few college level classes in chemistry and biology, in some cases they had degrees, and a lot of experience working in labs and in industrial facilities before joining our team.
This entire mask fiasco from my point of view and my previous co-workers point of view is the most ridiculous nonsense that we have ever witnessed in our lifetimes. My wife is a retired nurse and department head with decades of hands on clinical experience... she feels the same way. We are so offended by all the nonsense that it is sometimes difficult to engage in a rational conversation about it. The situation (not you) reminds me of when people ask my wife for her advice because they are feeling poorly. Sometimes she finds that they are eating a diet consisting of almost nothing other than bacon and hamburger. She spent years teaching nutrition and exercise classes and set up and ran "fat boy" programs at some of our local military bases. When she tells people who approached her for advice that their diet may have helped them to lose some weight but that their diets are not healthy or sustainable, she always gets a ration of crap back in return. This crap is always peppered with quotes from various diet guru books, videos and websites. These days she doesn't even bother trying to refute them because it is a futile waste of her time.
But smoke residue is also a witches brew of largely unknown chemical compounds depending on what was burning. We had incredibly expensive equipment including mass spectrometers that could gather mountains of raw data from samples we collected that is then analyzed with powerful computers and software to try and determine what the samples were actually made up of. But even knowing what substances were involved in the fire, something like smoke residue is typically so diverse that all we could really determine without waisting weeks or months were probabilities that we had various percentages of certain chemicals that we were actually looking for to begin with. Everything can be thrown off if some unknown substance was present.
I do not necessarily agree or disagree with your conclusions concerning smoke but your reasoning as stated is vastly oversimplified and may or may not have a great deal of validity in any argument. And that is the problem with Hazmat and so many other fields such as this... the more you dig, the more uncertainty you often introduce. So it all comes back to the application of "common sense", something which completely disappears as soon as any type of political influence is introduced.
Sorry to ramble.