Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They were useless. (2020)

Re:Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They we... by stevenalowe on Thursday May 13, 2021 @11:43AM (#27143382)

Logic issues with this: gauze and handkerchief masks were suboptimal perhaps but probably not useless. This is also an unrepeatable experiment - without masks it might have been worse, closing public spaces might have been better, etc.

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Re:Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They we... by whipaway on Thursday May 13, 2021 @12:23PM (#27143976)

> This is also an unrepeatable experiment

This frustrates any discussion about the pandemic and government response (and more broadly practically any question about govt policy & history), namely that these assertions always resort to counterfactuals.

So what happened and what could have happened with different policies is essentially unfalsifiable.

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Re:Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They we... by dang on Friday May 14, 2021 @07:53PM (#27160913)

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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Re:Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They we... by goatcode on Thursday May 13, 2021 @11:56AM (#27143603)

Indeed. People properly wearing and using N95 and above level protection would likely have fared better than people wearing fabric masks, back then.

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