Masks work.

If everyone is wearing a mask, there are at least two masks between you and an infected person.

Masks don't provide 100% protection, but nothing does. However, masks are important, because they enable people to safely perform essential activities like grocery shopping, and most jobs.

We don't need to stop _every single transmission_, all that we need to do is make sure that each infected person doesn't infect more than one person on average. If each infected person infects two people, for example, that's a chain reaction of spread where everybody eventually gets the virus. However, if each person has a 50-50 chance of infecting somebody else, than over time infections will go down, and Covid will eventually be gone.

Wearing a cloth mask is not difficult, and is a very tiny tradeoff in favor of a significant decrease in transmission chance.

https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-the-swiss-cheese-s...

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

The data tells a different story.

https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...

The data at this link has less than nothing to say about mask effectiveness.

One graph says, for example, that mask mandate areas in the US have slightly higher infection rates than non-mask mandate areas. But this is extremely expected - high infection rate is what prompts areas to mandate mask usage.

If I feel at risk (maybe because I observe people getting ill and dying), I comply. If I don't feel at risk, I don't care about complying.

Also, why no Asian countries on the international charts? That would be inconvenient for the point, hm?

> Also, why no Asian countries on the international charts?

Have you seen the news out of South Korea and Japan this week?

Do you mean South Korea and Japan where cumulative death rates per capita are now 1/60th and 1/40th of the US's equivalent figure?

What news are you talking about, specifically?

Their new case rates have risen to the point that they've lost control of the spread with current measures, so their current level of masking isn't enough.

> they've lost control of the spread with current measures

They are reporting this as "lost control" even though their spread continues to be lower than any Western country has had since mid-March? That tells a lot.

Well, I live in CA and the CA graph is missing a number of critical marks, including the point right before the spike where CA dialed back a number of regulations, allowed indoor dining, etc.

Missing such important information - the specific information that goes against the page's agenda - calls the entire thing into question. What else is it intentionally not showing?

What isn't shown in this graph is how the numbers would look without mask mandates.

Obviously even simple cloth masks help: notice how they get wet when you wear them? That moisture is your exhaled water droplets, the carriers of virusses, that don't end up in other people's faces!

Also, do you think surgeons wear masks for fashion reasons?

The mask discussion is absurd. A totally minor inconvenience vs. decreased virus exhaling, how can this be a topic for discussion?

Isn't mask compliance an important metric here that's not shown? Having a mandate doesn't really do much if people don't actually comply with it.

Compliance is the fifth chart down, and about 2/3 of the way down is a graph of new daily cases per million between mandated mask locations and those without any mandate.

The recent Danish study was the very first randomized controlled trial involving face masks and COVID-19 that reported (so far), and concluded:

"the plausible effect of the mask intervention ranged all the way from a 46% decrease in infection to a 23% increase"

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/danish-study-doesnt-prove-...

>Masks don't provide 100% protection,

So 1% protection ?

>but nothing does. However, masks are important, because they enable people to safely perform essential activities like grocery shopping, and most jobs.

fortunately that the chance of getting sick from covid from doing those activities without mask are very very low.

infection is not useful metric because only small percentage actually cause sickness.

Masks: The Science & The Myths : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RaBLKKXJt4

Are you insinuating that any improvement is not worth pursuing? Let's look at this a different way:

I have COVID and I'm contagious. I don't know that, of course, so I go to the grocery store. The same grocery store you're shopping it. We cross paths in the cereal aisle.

Would you rather me be wearing a mask?

As callous as it sounds, I don’t think doing things for “any improvement” means it is worth doing. Everything has a cost/benefit ratio. Are you going to wear a mask for the rest of your life in public and private (your household matters too) because you could catch the flu or someone could catch it from you? Are you going to stay out of motor vehicles because they could injure you or someone else?

People have become so extreme in their views that every single life matters that they forget how our 2019 way of life still had significant risk that nobody batted an eye at.

>Are you insinuating that any improvement is not worth pursuing

That is not what I insinuating at all.

>Would you rather me be wearing a mask

If you are sick, you should rest at home, just like with any other illness. I wouldn't care whether you wear mask or not.

> If you are sick, you should rest at home, just like with any other illness.

That's not what was asked. Covid has an up to two week asymptomatic period, there's a high chance that someone around you when you go out is infected and doesn't know. Would you rather them be wearing a mask or not?

It's not worth your time. Trust me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25388263

>Would you rather them be wearing a mask or not?

I already answer it :

>I wouldn't care whether you wear mask or not

Its up to them, make no difference to me, I have no reason and no interest to require them to wear mask.

how much protection would be enough for you to wear one? 50%? 75%? Hell, even 1% is higher than 0 and really, what's the harm?

Yea most people don't get very sick, except for the 300k that are dead just in the US.

2020 is coming to a close. In a couple of weeks we will have the final tally for the year. This is good because we can then compare it to other years in total. I suggest you check the all cause excess mortality figure. It's already been projected to be essentially the same. This is a really good metric to evaluate the threat level.

Here's a nice graph of deaths per month per millon for a nearly 200 year perspective: https://swprs.org/facts-about-covid-19/#foobox-1/3/sweden-mo...

There will be some mortality excess in 2020.

'The observed temporary excess mortality likely arises because people in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise, due to the timing and severity of the unusual external event.' https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...

I’m all for data driven decisions. We just need to be more careful to dig into the details of the data. A simple excess mortality figure may not be relevant. Both covid and the lockdowns could have caused increased or decreased mortalities in other areas.

Eg if there was zero excess mortality, that alone doesn’t prove much either way.

I wonder if we would have noticed this before modern hospitals and record keeping. I suspect it would have spread much slower, maybe over a decade. In a village of 1,000, there might be 5 deaths that would have been written off as a bad flu, or whatever people used to call getting sick like that.

> and really, what's the harm?

If people think a mask offers them more protection than it really does, they might engage in riskier behavior.

When I see people out walking around the neighborhood with masks on, I really wonder what they're trying to accomplish. You're not going to get covid walking outdoors passing within 6 feet of someone for 5 seconds.

These days, my theory is more people get infected at home than out in public.

Judgement is important of course. I wear masks around people but not when I’m driving or outdoors by myself. I think for a lot of people, it’s just easier not to put it on and take it off. For me for instance if I’m out hiking I just put it on and leave it on. Where as my partner will remove it when there is no one around and put it back on when someone is coming close by. I see the same thing with people driving short distances.

People getting infected at home may be a large vector, but the virus got in the home some how in the first place. It’s just easier to spread from that point onwards once it’s in.

New York State recently reported that 74% of infections spread between Sept and Nov 2000 took place during household social gatherings (based upon contact tracing data).

> household social gatherings

Also known as pods and bubbles.

They help even when they are worn wrong.

https://kottke.org/plus/misc/images/swiss-cheese-pandemic.jp...

how it help, from the picture it shown that virus particle are smaller than mask pores.

Masks: The Science & The Myths : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RaBLKKXJt4

Because the virus particles travel on other things, and those other things are big enough to get blocked.

No its because of Brownian Diffusion. Counter intuitively masks block particles smaller than 0.3 microns (such as virus’s) more easily than particles at around 0.3 microns in size.

It is particles that are around 0.3 microns in size that filters have the most difficulty blocking. N95 particles block 95% of particles of 0.3 microns in size. N99 Masks block 99% of particles at 0.3 microns.

As I understand it smaller particles get ‘stuck’ in the maze of fibres and are statistically unlikely to find there way through the mask. The best analogy I can think of is a spec of dust finding its way into a centre of a huge labarynth that is vibrating randomly in all directions (and coated in honey). Some respirator masks also contain anti viral coatings and are electrostaticaly charged.

Interesting. Is it that particles smaller than 0.3 microns have more dynamic and random motion? I mean, why is it that particles smaller than 0.3 microns are likely to be "stuck" where as at 0.3 microns they aren't?

I realized the original comment was about surgical masks.. I was commenting about the filtering properties of multi-layered polypropylene masks. I'm afraid its a bit beyond my Science / Engineering / Maths skills at the moment to try and explain it any better.. but maybe this link will help? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00022470.1980.10...

Amazing to still see this kind of misinformation posted here, so many months in.

What is your "except maybe a very specific mask usage"? Because i thought the well studied data was clear on mask usage.

At least over the summer, most of the studies were in medical settings, in vitro, or had some other asterisk attached that made it hard to generalize.