It was criminal. There was a ton of circumstantial evidence: SARS-CoV-1 was thought to spread via airborne droplets, the high rate of transmission, the types of transmission, medical staff infections, reduced rates of transmissions in countries where mask wearing while sick was common, ... we would have convicted COVID19 on less evidence.
But no double blind experiments, so no proof. Go about your day citizens!
It was only over a year (with a lot of evidence) that the CDC said “aerosol transmission is maybe sorta kinda possible maybe”.
There are multiple ways to validate an idea, and sometimes you can’t design a blind rct. We know parachutes work despite never having proven it in an rct trial.
In fact, the one study examining parachute use showed no effect! ;-) https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
> ... [T]he trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.
Hah. Ah, yes. Always read carefully!
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
We really need to stop repeating the talking point that "everyone screwed up". The original evidence base was that masks don't do much to stop respiratory illness. "The science" changed in the span of a week in early 2020, based on little more than propaganda. No actual science was ever performed, and once we did some, we found out that the early evidence was pretty much correct.
Each random person's picture of masks will be very different from what the next person is thinking.
And it's also very important to distinguish between the different meanings of viral transmission – of what virus, and according to what scientific results it's being talked about.
A lot of the friction comes from this.
In SARS-CoV-2 transmission specifically, I speak about it as airborne or aerosolized, based on all the papers that are out that confirm that now, and I when I say "masks" I tend to think of gaping surgical masks or better, and no, those don't work well enough.
However in the sense of the word masks as N95/FFP2 masks or better—often called respirators—then those masks are almost unreasonably effective at stopping transmission.
Here's the data I base my perspective on, in the nutshell form of some tweets from scientists, tweets linking to scientific papers. (Some are peer-reviewed, some at the preprint stage.)
https://twitter.com/JenniferKShea/status/1449748053548752903 — We've summarized the literature supporting airborne transmission of COVID-19 & several other respiratory pathogens. Guess what? #COVIDisAirborne
https://twitter.com/mjb302/status/1409628852867850240 — Important new research examining the real world impact better PPE has on workplace acquired infections of SARS-CoV2. — TL:DR - FFP3 respirators provide 100% protection to healthcare workers looking after patients infected with SARS-CoV2. 1/25
https://twitter.com/andymoz78/status/1441355141051936772 — A thread on our recent pre-print “The removal of airborne SARS-CoV-2 and other microbial bioaerosols by air filtration on COVID-19 surge units” (*Pre-print -not peer reviewed*) — TL:DR Hospital air is dirty, we can clean it
https://twitter.com/DFisman/status/1454776521818886145 — Remarkable new work from Korea shows the extraordinary impact of masks on SARS-2 transmission on public transit. — Parameterized based on *aerosol* simulator. (Because SARS-2 is airborne). Distancing helps, but less important (b/c SARS-2 = airborne).
https://twitter.com/caruzycki/status/1360635674324463616 — 2/ If this disease were only spread by droplets that fell to the ground within 2 metres, [plexiglass barriers] would be a perfectly fine solution to limit transmission. Unfortunately, we unequivocally know that aerosols are important with this disease.
People keep dismissing this, but respirators in hospitals are very different than respirators in the hands of the general public. Fit matters more than anything else, and hospitals have staff and procedures to ensure that PPE is used correctly.
This isn't a small or theoretical concern. Even a tiny gap negates the effect of the respirator, and people don't fit their respirators properly -- in large part because properly worn respirators are annoying and hard to tolerate for long periods of time. I regularly see people walking around with KN95 masks on their faces, with massive gaps around the nose and chin. These masks are pure viral theater.
(Also, not for nothing: two of the twitter links you cite are about respirators in hospitals. the other two are mechanistic studies, which are basically useless. Every failed intervention or drug in the history of medicine has a mountain of plausible mechanistic studies supporting it. Most things don't work, but everything we try has someone claiming that it's a sure-fire solution, based on a lab study.)
In hospitals, high importance is rightfully placed on correctly fitting N95/FFP2 and up – this is so that they function to spec and can be formally assumed to work like the specification indicates so they can be applied as a tool in general use by, well, by a population of staff.
This does not mean that respirators which are worn in a reasonable manner will ever be as poor filtration devices as gaping masks, especially not if the pathogen is airborne / aerosolized and operates almost purely as air flow, not droplets with mass and inertia to consider.
And COVID-19 is airborne and must be considered as airborne. There were five links, and the fifth is a collection of papers :) There is also a significant amount of detail and discussion and framing and context in adjacent tweets i all the links.
If you have any issues with my comment above which is based on clearly delineated and reasonable personal opinion and includes links to the scientific results it is based on, you have a duty to respond, not downvote.
At no point in any blog post did I see the blogger refer to themselves as conservative. Only cheering conservatives on a lot and blaming the left for a bunch of stuff (the only group the blogger said he has identified or belonged to)
You're engaged in tribalism: defining people as members of the other team because they disagree with you on one issue.
I am on the left, and agree with Prasad that the institutional left has done generational damage with its response to Covid, abandoned reason and equity and respect for science. If the "right" happens to agree with me, then that's fine.
(that might have an effect for 100 years?)
A 7 year old child is extremely malleable, and especially socially needs an incredible amount of input to develop as a person. What you do today to a 7 year old for (currently) 2 years has a massive effect later.
Not to mention, how do you think a 7 year olds parents are affected by lockdowns who they are locked up with? Alcoholism? Up. Drug abuse? Up. Domestic abuse? Up.
So again, where is the guy wrong?
Every one cares about children.
> I’m not sure what makes you right wing
The person consistently bashes the left and praises conservatives. I said that too. Not just school closures in isolation. What would you call someone who does that? Also I brought up the only association they do quickly make is saying they used to be progressive. Another common tactic taken by people who either never were and definitely aren’t now left of center at all. However they will keep leaning right without ever saying they lean right.
A number of political internet personalities in the intellectual dark web continue to do this ploy to varying degrees. Two less egregious examples are Stephen Pinker and Joe Rogan. Two more obviously slanted examples are the Pool and Rubin guy.
—
> Alcoholism? Up. Drug abuse? Up. Domestic abuse? Up.
I stated this in another comment. The status quo has never been good for children who were lower socioeconomically. All metrics: school funding, the amount learned, correlation between exam scores and going to university, all are unfair with our status quo.
Why is there suddenly this behavior of caring for all children as if mostly the right and maybe some centrists who want schools open are the ones who care about children. The blogger specially said the left is bad because they kept schools closed. As if the left doesn’t care about children as much.
All the issues you mentioned effect lower socioeconomic families more than any any other group of people. Where is the care for them when the war on drugs screwed stuff up for so long? It’s hard to believe these things are truly cared about when they have never been a focus for the vast majority of the country, both left and right, until the pandemic became insanely politicize and the right didn’t like the lockdowns.
We care because these things have gotten worse in lockdowns, proven by numbers. Just because something has existed before, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give a shit when it increases.
Especially if you’re supposedly left wing which I imagine you identify with.
“Poorer people always had more alcoholism and domestic abuse, so why do I care if it goes up if schools close”
That’s a ridiculous attitude.
Btw the whole point of politics and left and right should be that we discuss things and point things out to each other where they are going. Just because that guy to you is right wing doesn’t mean 100% of what he says is wrong. People both on left and right are right about certain things and certain times. That’s why we need debate and not polarization. You are dismissing OP for being right wing in your eyes, and dismissing everything he says.
Well maybe you can accuse him of exaggerating but it's true to an extent. In my (third world) country students have effectively missed two years of schooling, I know some primary students who don't know how to read/write very well.
Since pandemic I have lived in two places: one affluent and the other solidly middle class. Anecdotally, it didn’t seem like any of the children were close to harmed in a generational way. Society already screws over less affluent and colored students their entire lives. It’s interesting that only now the blogger and conservatives care about the well being of these kids’ educations. When otherwise the status quo does not benefit them.
0 the references I’ve seen that I remember are Hispanic and black parents not wanting their kids to go back to in person school.
Dr. Tam, who is responsible for both gross incompetence AND intentionally misleading the public WRT COVID19, mistakes that literally killed people and, is probably still killing people, remains in her position as Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. This is why I can't let it go.
On a serious note, how often did they really mess up? In a sense of having consequences that are close to impossible to fix? Not once, if you ask me.
Not all lies are malicious. Some are necessary. "Masks aren't helpful" was one of those. Everyone with a three-digit IQ should have understood what was really going on, and everyone else was better off believing the lie.
I works well as a name to remind people that all this was caused by the neglect of the CCP that was instrumental in allowing the virus to spread.
Blaming China, and one wrong recommendation about masks for the mess parts of the developed world finds itself in is just disingenuous. After Italy was a couple to days to slow in 2020, we know what to do. And we fail doing it. And that failing has nothing whatsoever to do with China or our experts, but rather large swaths of the population, and politicians, refusing to accept measures and guidance.
No, we are back to where we started, placing blame where it belongs, on the CCP: first for suppressing the information about a new SARS outbreak and claiming it was not human transmissable, then second for a laughably ineffective Wuhan lockdown. It was ineffective, allowing asymptomatic infected people to escape, for two reasons:
• Some people who did not fancy being put under lockdown left the region by car and found holes in the secure perimeter or simply bribed the patrols, those who were successful doing so shared the routes and bragged about it on Wechat.
• The party secretariat ordered the airport to stop domestic flights, but the international flights continued as usual. Tracing revealed the virus was subsequently carried off abroad, initially to Thailand.
But let's say, just for a thought experiment, it was all the CCPs (bad communists, aren't they?) fault. How exactly does that help us now? Or does it excuse some of our democratic governments from screwing up? Or people from not getting vaccinated? I don't think so.
Yeah, the CCP sucks. Taking away personal freedom, incerting spyware in phones in other countries, ignoring human rights left and right wherever they go, paying of our capitalism based democracies, continuously threatening Taiwan and strong-arming everyone (from the IOSB all the way to western democratic governments) from acknowledging Taiwan as an independent nation. But COVID? Not so much.
Yes, you are, as you admit to it with the next sentence. I have read your argument why it should be okay and understand it, but I cannot allow you to be less than precise with your writing. When we examine the (in)actions of the party, we should name the party, or talk about the government. We should not use the term for the country because that concept also subsumes the territory and the people. The people as a whole however cannot be held responsible for the government because most of them neither support it (in the sense that if they could magically wish it away tomorrow free of consequences, they would do so) nor did they vote for it or bring it into power nor are the interests of the government and the interests of the people aligned or represented.
Talking about the country or the people as a way to deflect from the party is an old propaganda trick employed on a daily basis by the party, it must always be challenged.
> bad communists, aren't they?
What's the point of that tangent? Everyone knows there is not much communism left, the reforms after Deng have completely abolished the concept in its economic interpretation. The word itself, the trappings of hammer and sickle, the raised fist during a vow, this is all but for show. The most ardent adherents to the ideology can nowhere be seen in positions of power, that's mostly found among block wardens who have a genuine interest in helping out their neighbours and sharing among the local community and also the members of the youth organisations because young minds are easily impressionable by the theory.
If I would characterise the CCP as it relates to the outward world, words like deliberate liars and cry-bullies, incredible neglect and delinquency of duty, not giving a shit about human dignity or life, destroyers of the environment come to my mind first, rather than communist.
> How exactly does that help us now?
It helps by changing our mind in the light of information. We will not be blind-sided any more by information that turns out to be manufactured or false, we will be more cautious and we can make better decisions that way in the future. To make this more clear: instead of operating on a baseline of medium to high trust as it is has developed as the common case in our Western high culture over the last centuries, we recognise that the trust has been abused and operate from a baseline of low trust instead.
> does it excuse some of our democratic governments from screwing up?
Yes, I think somewhat. They are a victim of disinformation. I keep a large share of the blame on our governments because they are more interested in stocking water cannon lorries and police APC rather than masks and other disaster supplies.
> Or people from not getting vaccinated?
IMO that is not in the purview of any government, in the sense that they should offer vaccination free of charge to any resident, but not enforce ("accept vaccination or face repression by the power of the state") or even nudge ("accept vaccination and receive a yellow pass or face not being able to participate in social life any more"). I have thought about this and have come to the conclusion that any amount of force is a human rights violation on medical ethics grounds. This should be an explicit part of the human rights declaration, but sadly is not.
I am vaccinated, I personally encourage the people near me to get vaccinated, and demand that those who refuse on non-medical grounds must take responsibility for the consequences of their choice and when getting sick go into a forest to die and not take up a hospital slot because it is not fair to earn the benefits of being part of society without paying the dues.
> But COVID? Not so much.
I don't get it, you enumerate five items of suck, but the spread of the virus through neglect and disinformation which falls into the same observable operative patterns of the party will not be a part of it?
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
but based on your own contention, you won't read it, so here's a key sentence from the abstract:
The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts.
Could you link some?
What I have read seems to suggest otherwise, for example "Efficacy of face mask in preventing respiratory virus transmission: A systematic review and meta-analysis" [1]
Key conclusion: "Meta-analyses suggest that mask use provided a significant protective effect"
A number of studies have been linked in sibling comments, studying the effects of cloth masks. They work to significant reduce exhaled contaminant load.
> In one study, during talking, unmasked subjects expelled more than 5,000 contaminants per 5 cubic feet; 7.2% of the contaminants were associated with particles less than 4 μm in diameter (68). Cloth-masked subjects expelled an average of 19 contaminants per 5 cubic feet; 63% were less than 4 μm in diameter. So overall, over 99% of contaminants were filtered. The second study used the same experimental setup, but studied a wider range of mask designs, including a four-ply cotton mask. For each mask design, over 97% contaminant filtration was observed (69).
> https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118#abstract-1
Also, at this point we know that even if you catch COVID-19, the viral load that you catch plays a factor in how seriously ill you get. Masks reduce the viral load that a sick person exposes others to.
Why?
I am not the parent and also not a native English speaker - is it not common to call respirators also "masks"? Does that term refer to surgical masks only? I live in the Czech Republic and the Czech word "maska", which is translated as "mask" (and I assume comes from the same latin origin) is pretty general term used to refer to basically anything that covers something.
If it is not a general term, do people in the US still really use surgical masks with the intention of protecting themselves from Covid? Where I live we would be talking about FFP2 and above, discussing surgical masks as covid protection would be irrelevant because no one wears them (granted, many people do not wear anything). Is it not like that in the US?
What is especially galling is that for all his hardline rhetoric and complete lack of respect or fear for the rest of the world Xi is terrified of the reprisals at home if he banned CNY travel.
For some reason, people don't see the consequences of action and inaction symmetrically. If an administrator chooses a risky intervention and it turns out to be the wrong choice, we hold that person more liable than another administrator who chooses inaction with equally bad consequences. Because we give administrators power and hold them liable for their choices, we expect them to avoid risky interventions out of self-interest.
Early in the pandemic, experts put too much weight on the risks of improper mask use. Perhaps because they were trained to use masks in risky situations where the consequences of improper use were real. It took them some time to realize that the general public would be using masks in low-risk situations, which reduced the expected risks significantly.
Prevention paradox.
Regarding the masks, at least in Germany the problem was different... politicians knew that masks were effective but, since the stockpiles of the Cold War era had been dismantled and domestic production all but non-existent because no matter what China is going to be at least 10x cheaper, they feared a "bank run" on the few masks that were still in the country.
Politicians didn't have the guts to come out and say "yes, we know that masks help, but please don't go on shopping sprees, we need every single mask there is for the hospitals".
In 2009 as H1N1 started ramping up the reserve had half a billion masks (and 100 million already ordered), the health minister launched buildup order to increase the stockpile to 1.7 billion (a billion surgigals and 700m N95/FFP2).
After H1N1 drew down, the health minister got greatly criticised for the expense, and following the event the agency got slowly starved out: the government decided to drop FFP2s entirely, and significantly draw down the stock of surgicals. In 2013 it moved the entire thing over to private entities (companies were supposed to stock up masks for employees, imagine how stupid that idea is).
Obviously this completely killed the domestic production in short order as companies were not doing jack shit, and even if they had they’d have bought chinese production. As soon as 2015 all the companies set up after 2006 had folded, and domestic production capabilities were essentially gone.
In 2016, the agency which had been specifically set up to oversee pandemic preparation and response to pandemics was killed, officially “folded” into a more general public health agency, after having been slowly starved of funds for years.
When COVID-19 hit, the country had no production capabilities (500 million masks a year) and the stock was essentially nil (about 150 million masks, 3 weeks worth of healthcare demand alone).
My recollection was that it was much worse. They definitively and aggressively said that it was _not_ transmitted via aerosols.
"no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus"
I posit that's not what happened, there was no absent evidence. The NHC knew full well that they had (another) SARS on their hands in January 2020, but lied to the WHO because they were directed by the party to suppress the findings for the usual reasons (don't rock the boat, save face on the global stage, keep the populace under control). The WHO took this false information and neglected to verify it before disseminating it, so they are complicit in the affair.
“In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25)” https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
Also note, what you posted is not a scientific study. It’s a made up model. Real world evidence is falling in line with previous scientific knowledge. Countries w/out mask mandates have no statistical difference in transmission, as expected. But, the whole thing has been politicized.
Generalizing from influenza to COVID-19 seems like a big assumption.
Cool story bro, but I disagree. If we were following the scientific method how to explain why 70% of studies cannot be reproduced?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Political_r...
"A similar survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility showed that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments."
Not to mention that basically all studies are paid for by one of only 3 (connected) sources - military, government or corporations.
If you control the purse strings, you decide what to (or not to) study.
Which explains all sorts of basic 'anomalies' - such as that we don't know what the best sort of diet is for us.
It took way too long to figure out that absolute LDL cholesterol levels predict nothing and that only oxidized LDL (even at extremely small concentrations) is a predictor for heart disease.
So California looks at Florida in horror, even though COVID just keeps on truckin' through Cali. And Florida screams that a mask is history's greatest threat to liberty, even though it's a plain and obvious way to reduce transmission.
California’s recent COVID death rate per 100K population is 2/3 Floridas, and the COVID incidence is concentrated in the counties with Florida-like attitudes.
About what you’d expect if the actual recent infection rates were similar after Florida's drop from its mich higher recent peak, rather than Florida's being now much lower the way the reported case rates would suggest.
California’s death rate is far lower than Florida. This isn’t something you should be both-sidesing. Tens of thousands of Californians are still alive because of the measures we’ve taken.
And it’s not so much horror as disgust and confusion, like seeing someone smearing feces on themselves and saying “I trolled u!!”
Not sure my point is getting across. I’m not quite sure what my point is. Still trying to figure out what makes California (and especially San Francisco) different without resorting to simple left vs right language.
So the question California dares not ask itself is: were all the restrictions actually necessary? Maybe small businesses could have been allowed to open sooner with a mask + ventilation requirement, for example. Or maybe a single, uniform policy did not make sense for the enormously-varied state. But you can't ask those questions.
How many children were never conceived since their parents were out of work, or unsure about the future?
Plus Florida has moved on since 8 months ago. No everything is measured in only covid deaths.
FL had record breaking deaths 2 months ago.
Dozens of deaths in high population centers in California every day: http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus/data/inde...
Stay in your fucking home, even if you're vaccinated.
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...
Also: please make your substantive points without flamebait. Your comment here would be fine without the last sentence.
Is the idea that mask policy would make up for all the politicians calling it "the China virus"?
I agree my comment doesn't reply to stuff higher up in the thread.
Basically I kept hearing only n95 I’d effective, or you’ll use them wrong. We know masks would help more with larger droplets, yet we persisted with the lie.
To be fair, there was also a shortage of masks, so I don't think the consequences would be much better if they acted correctly.
The worst result was reducing the confidence of the people in health authorities. We are still to pay the price for that.
This was not just in the US, exact same thing happened in most of Europe.
The first rule of politics is to never let a good crisis go to waste. The second rule of politics is to always piss on whatever your opponents are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
I’m not saying the deception was necessary, just illustrating it’s not black and white. It would’ve become a partisan issue regardless with Trump doing his performative masculinity routine and refusing to wear them.
Why would you not want to follow a conservative, evidence-based variant of the scientific method?
> During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision.
And the current administration continues to employ this official and give them a microphone
That's half the problem here, with anti-maskers screaming that they can't breathe.
You can try forcing them, like we're doing now, and they'll just take off their mask to cough and sneeze like half the passengers in my last flight + take every possible option to take it off + wear it off their nose to begin with.
The evidence quality is roughly as poor as that for ivermectin, vitamin D, etc., except that it has become a wildly political issue, fraught with propaganda to the point that most people will vehemently insist that the evidence quality is higher than it is. It is therefore deeply ironic that Slate is arguing about risk compensation, while using NPIs as an example of the kind of safety behavior being deterred by discussions of risk compensation. Did any of those NPIs do anything at all? We never did proper randomized studies, so we really have no idea.
This feels like so much more propaganda: one side said that risk compensation is a thing, so now we must attack the notion, to ensure that $MY_PREFERRED_INTERVENTION is properly imposed on society. But nobody much cares if the intervention works...
[1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
People were washing their hands, using hand sanitizer, opening doors with crazy key-chains, basically not touching anything, wearing gloves, fist and elbow bumping ... when they really needed to not be breathing each others air.
There's simply no part of this pandemic that makes "the experts" look good, and it has utterly destroyed any remaining faith that I had in journalism. Now we merely have competing ideological factions, and their preferred sources of propaganda.
A month ago, I was judgemental towards a couple who were "overly protective" about the virus. It turns out they did REALLY risky stuff, and they were "overly protective" to protect me.
Maybe the people in the grocery store with gloves have open wounds and don't want to spread infected blood around.
I guess we'll never know. But there sure are a lot of folks wearing gloves now who weren't wearing them before. And that's why I was sighing.
That sentence is about CDC messaging.
There would be people wearing dirty rubber gloves in grocery stores if they did it perfect.
I think that might have played a role, yes.
But it was, and id, certainly contributing to it.
Yeah, the inability to call the "experts" out when they were clearly wrong and now the constant interviews with "the vaccine hesitant" ...
That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask: so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one.
As for the rest of your comment, the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that, so low that it drowns in the noise and is essentially a complete wash, and there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity.
No, because that's not what the 11% number was measuring. You can't just take an 11% relative reduction in population seroprevalence at a given time, and then blindly multiply the virus R0 by that factor. They observed a drop in symptomatic seroprevalence that corresponded to about 1 case for for every 1300 people who wore a mask. That is nowhere near an 11% drop in R0 (which you'll recall is an exponent).
> That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask:
How do you know? Have you measured it? No, of course you haven't. You're just asserting things.
> so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one.
Fine. You should take Ivermectin, then. And vitamin D. And flush your sinuses daily with a neti pot. And get your chakra aligned. It's essentially the same argument. Can't hurt, might help! By your logic, it all must be done.
...or do you just pick-and-choose which unsupported interventions you prefer to believe in?
(for the record: I do not believe you should take Ivermectin. But it is the same argument.)
> the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that,
It really isn't. Just like mask studies, there are a few weakly suggestive good ones, and a few bad ones that make ridiculous claims, and a whole lot of nonsense in between.
> there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity.
No, not really. It's a pretty common, safe drug. We probably know more about the downsides of Ivermectin than we do about the downsides of (say) masking young children in school.
You are also continuously seeking reasons to justify the way you have already decided you want to go about this, so effectively you are just arguing for your own satisfaction, not to gain insight.
Your arguments by assertion hold no water for me. Good luck with this attitude.
If you are arguing anything else than you aren't actually being consistent in your reasoning.
Risks are also low for eating 50 Kg of bananas, it might cure COVID, so why not try it? This sort of reasoning is complete nonsense when it comes to picking your medications.
The null hypothesis is "it does not work". Then you carefully design a study to take care of all the variables, you do your double blind test with a placebo and you look at outcomes. That's the standard. Anything less simply won't do. 'Might work' isn't a reason for (self) prescription.
As for mask effectiveness: they work, there is ongoing debate over how much they work. Like everything else in terms of countermeasures, absolutely nothing will be a 100% sure filter so we layer multiple filters on top of each other to improve the degree of protection we achieve, aka the cheese model.
It's interesting how you say that so definitively, when there are multiple, large RCTs ongoing, evaluating the question.
Perhaps you're substituting your opinions for science?
> The null hypothesis is "it does not work". Then you carefully design a study to take care of all the variables, you do your double blind test with a placebo and you look at outcomes. That's the standard.
> As for mask effectiveness: they work, there is ongoing debate over how much they work.
Funny how "the standard" shifts from topic to topic, sentence to sentence. When it's an intervention you support, the presumption is positive, even if the collective evidence of effect is...mixed, at best.
So these studies are in the realm of 'we can't rule it out 100% let's check one more time'. Since this is a forum and not a scientific paper I can claim with some confidence that it isn't going to work, if you want to take the opposite side of that bet be my guest.
Masks work, whether it is 10% or 15% effective is what's at stake there, not whether they work or not. If ivermectin was 10% effective it would have been established long ago.
You are guilty of exactly those things that you accuse me of.
timr took the effort to correct you point-for-point. You come back with "Fine! I'll take my ball and go home then!"
I'm not sure what made you dig in your heels like that (personal reasons?), but to good-faith bystanders your arguments appear petty and unreasonable.
Somehow I start to suspect that masks might have a similar effectiveness that are dependant on climate, air humidity and widespread co-infections. Maybe not effective against covid but might prevent other infections that ultimately make covid worse or make them more susceptible to covid.
I'm generally in support of the masking rules BUT I also have a very young baby and there is definitely a high cost for him. Not seeing a smile when he is left at daycare has caused him to cry more than once, I don't even want to think about the long term effects of seeing so much less facial expression in his critical first months.
I know this is a talking point of anti-maskers but let's not pretend all of the other side's arguments are bogus _because_ they made it. This is just one example, there _is_ a cost to masking up the entire population.
He says;
> Interestingly, in the only published cluster RCT to date during COVID19, surgical masks had an 11% risk reduction and cloth masks had no effect at all on the primary endpoint of symptom driven lab positive result
The actual study showed that with intervention, the scientists increased the rate of mask wearing from 13% to 42% -- and that 29/100 person uptake was enough to reduce Covid seropresence by 11% in the community. That's a huge effect! Fewer than half of the people in the villages were wearing masks and symptomatic Covid saw >10% reduction compared to villages without extra mask wearing. It's abundantly clear that the effect would be far greater with universal masking so to say "mask wearing only leads to a 10% reduction" omits a massive part of the story.
https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...
To quote the authors who tried in vain to prevent people like Vinay from mangling their research:
> Our results should not be taken to imply that masks can prevent only 10% of COVID-19 cases, let alone 10% of COVID-19 mortality. Our intervention induced 29 more people out of every 100 to wear masks, with 42% of people wearing masks in total. The total impact with near universal masking–perhaps achievable with alternative strategies or stricter enforcement–may be several times larger than our 10% estimate. Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used, and even more for the highest-risk individuals in our sample (23% for ages 50-60 and 35% for ages 60+). These numbers likely give a better sense of the impact of our intervention on severe morbidity and mortality, since most of the disease burden is borne by the elderly. Where achievable, universal mask adoption is likely to have still larger impacts.
No, it isn't. Because he's being generous: the 11% difference was on a baseline seroprevalence of 0.76%. So you have a study where cloth masks were shown to be completely ineffective, and the total absolute effect size of the surgical mask arm was .08% (edit: 0.09% per the numbers in the paper).
In other words: you'd have to get 1300 people to wear masks to prevent one seropositive (in case you're wondering, the confidence interval on that value overlaps zero.) No matter how you spin it, this is a small, small effect. And this is in a completely unvaccinated population -- the best possible scenario for masks.
Even if we accept the argument that "several times more" people would be protected if we lived in a fictional, ideal universe where everyone wore surgical masks (newsflash: we don't), we're still only talking about a total effect size of a fraction of a percent.
Oh and by the way, it's particularly hilarious that the paragraph you quoted says the following:
> Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used
That has to go in my top-five lifetime examples of weasel-wording for reframing negative experimental outcomes. Cloth masks showed no effect. Saying that surgical masks reduced prevalence "more" is like saying that together, Ootani Shohei and I hit 46 home runs last year. But yeah, he hit more.
Wait a second.
> In other words: you'd have to get 1300 people to wear masks to prevent one seropositive (in case you're wondering, the confidence interval on that value overlaps zero.)
You are assuming 0.76% prevalence. This is, I assume, in specific point of time, but somehow, you extend this to long-term intervention.
If you spin COVID-19 "but only 0.5% of population is infected _right now_", any intervention will seem extremely ineffective. "Oh, you want to vaccinate 300 millions of people to prevent 2000 deaths" (without saying it's 2000 deaths _per day_).
I am not. I'm using the numbers from the paper to illustrate a point.
Even if seroprevalence was as high as 6% at any given time (which is about as high as it ever was in NYC, for example), an 11% difference is 0.66%, or 1 case per 152 people wearing masks. And that's in a fully unvaccinated population.
We're simply not talking about huge differences here. Certainly nothing close to a statistically meaningful difference in R0.
That's not accurate unless I'm missing something... sticking with just the surgical mask arm -- the effect size of 0.08% was based on a binary mask vs. non-mask intervention. It has no relation to the number of people masking. The intervention was getting more people to mask -- they succeeded mildly, where 6/10 people still hadn't masked. But that was sufficient for a 10% reduction in seropositive cases.
Edit;
They actually address this specifically;
Our estimates suggest that mask-wearing increased by 28.8 percentage points, corresponding to an estimated 51,347 additional adults wearing masks in intervention villages, and this effect was persistent even after active mask promotion was discontinued. The intervention led to a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence (which corresponds to a 103 fewer symptomatic seropositives) and an 11.9% reduction in the prevalence of COVID-like symptoms, corresponding to 1,587 fewer people reporting these symptoms.
So for 51,000 people additional people wearing masks -- 1,600 people were spared Covid symptoms and 103 people were spared symptoms + seropostive diagnosis. This with only a total of 42% of people wearing masks and a relatively low level of underlying Covid.
It's an especially obvious intervention based on the exponential potential of Covid infection and early R0 of 6 or whatever it was, plus how effective the surgical masks were (especially in older age groups via Figure 3).
The RCT was a binary test of each kind of mask. Any other outcome is imaginary. There's no mathematical adjustment that can tell you what would have happened in the hypothetical alternative universe where everyone wore a surgical mask. That's just storytelling with numbers.
> But that was sufficient for a 10% reduction in seropositive cases.
No. It was a an 11% relative reduction, on a 0.76% seropositivity rate. The actual effect size was about 0.09% (I wrote 0.08% earlier, because I just divided the two numbers, and didn't use the figures from the paper). When you compare the cost of an intervention to the benefits, you use the absolute effect size, because you don't pay relative costs for your interventions (e.g. is it worth forcing every toddler in the world to wear a mask while sleeping for a "huge" 66% relative risk reduction from 0.0000003% to 0.0000001%? Probably not unless you're a crazy person. The costs vastly outweigh the benefits, even though the "relative" benefit is strong.)
> Our estimates suggest that mask-wearing increased by 28.8 percentage points, corresponding to an estimated 51,347 additional adults wearing masks in intervention villages, and this effect was persistent even after active mask promotion was discontinued. The intervention led to a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence (which corresponds to a 103 fewer symptomatic seropositives) and an 11.9% reduction in the prevalence of COVID-like symptoms, corresponding to 1,587 fewer people reporting these symptoms.
This is garbage. They're combining the two mask arms and claiming a combined effect size, even though the cloth mask arm was shown to have no effect. You can't do that. They're spinning like crazy to hide a weak outcome. They also don't report the raw numbers for the arms, and they don't dwell too much on the fact that "distancing" increased in the mask villages over the controls. That could easily swamp the measured effects. But I digress.
The surgical mask villages had 106,201 people, and an 11.2% relative reduction in seroprevalence, from 0.76% to 0.67%. The cloth mask villages saw essentially no difference at all: 0.76% vs 0.74%
There's simply no way to look at this data as anything than incredibly weak evidence for masks. I honestly can't believe we're fighting about something that makes, at best, a tiny fraction of a percent difference in outcome. Mass hysteria.
I whole-heartedly don't understand this.. in the places with universal masking, there is essentially no Covid (most of Asia, even cities like SF). Surgical masks are obviously sufficient to prevent most infection in hospital and other clinical settings. There's evidence that even a small portion of people wearing them in public reduces the incidence of disease. And your takeaway is that it's mass hysteria to encourage an extraordinarily cheap NPI?
Just completely, utterly wrong. Japan had a huge spike this winter. Korea is currently at all-time highs. Vietnam is currently near all-time highs. Thailand peaked at 20,000 cases per day, and is currently at 10,000.
These numbers are lower than the US in absolute terms, but claiming "essentially no Covid" means only that you aren't informed of the reality of the situation. Covid is running rampant across Asia, even now.
> There's evidence that even a small portion of people wearing them in public reduces the incidence of disease.
There is literally no evidence of this. The few RCTs that have performed suggest the opposite: you have to put masks on a huge number of people (hundreds to thousands) to prevent even a single case.
> And your takeaway is that it's mass hysteria to encourage an extraordinarily cheap NPI?
No, my takeaway is that there's very little evidence supporting the use of masks. Because there isn't. And most of what there is, is of exceptionally low quality.
The major difference to Germany I see between the two countries in terms of measures, Japanese were masks (vaccinated) and Mask Wearing in Germany has become political as it did in the US.
the only places outside of healthcare settings where masking plausibly makes any difference for ordinary folks is at home (amongst friends/family) and in crowded indoor social gatherings (club, house party, etc.). a modicum of physical distancing is all that's need in most public places to minimize tranmission risk about as much as is possible. combine that with masking public-facing workers (like cashiers), and we've maxed out the potential of masking as an intervention. everything else is theater.
There's also a thought experiment, which is convenient, since the outcome is open to everyone's interpretation. But it's not actual data.
pointing out elsewhere in the thread that when the CDC fucked up, they ultimately admitted it and changed recommendations, does not support your argument.
Medical doctors are not scientists, or even engineers. They are more like highly-skilled technicians. NTTAWWT, but the MD degree by itself shouldn't bring individual doctors anywhere as much social and scientific credibility as it does. For most Americans, the best source of information on COVID has been, and remains, their public health authorities.
a contradictory conclusion, and somehow both falling for and denying the appeal to authority fallacy at the same time. you discount doctors being 'experts' but then claim another group of 'experts' being the right ones (with no justification, no less).
there is no shortcut when it comes to triangulating reality. all the data must be considered, not just your favored sources. otherwise, you will be biased and very likely incorrect (you shouldn't even have favored sources). note that the original article literally points out a bias/fallacy that public health officials have fallen prey to.
It should be obvious that the burden of proof lies with the outlying opinion, but somehow, it never is.
Prasad is routinely interviewed & quoted by the "left-wing media". You are eager to fixate on the "wing" of the media coverage, but not engage with the argument being made.
Public health "authorities" are groups of people with opinions. Other people with expertise are no more or less qualified to have opinions, even if you don't agree with those opinions. If those opinions are backed by evidence and reason, and your opinions are backed by appeals to authority, then you lose.
> It should be obvious that the burden of proof lies with the outlying opinion
Close, but wrong. The burden of proof lies on the person advancing a hypothesis, whether that person is within the consensus or outside of it. Citing an authority does not excuse you from the burden of proof, any more than it excused the church in the time of Gallileo.
Not sure which side of the argument you are on, but it's funny, did you see how the death count for vaccinated people on the 22,000 pfizer study has been corrected from 17 to 24 people?
And the FDA has asked for 76 years to ongoingly release the safety data on the vaccine?
I'm vaccinated, but I'm super angry and worried about wtf is going on here.
What's certain is, yes: If this pandemic has proven anything, it's that there are incompetent and corrupt people EVERYWHERE on ALL SIDES.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/11/19/fda-2076-vaccine-data...
If these people were operating in good faith, it would endanger their valued reputations as certified antivax nutjobs.
Filters work better under suction than pressure - because they are less likely to leak.
So why have a nonsensical system where everybody has to wear a mask properly all the time and change it regularly in the correct manner just to have any material effect, when an individual that is worried could just wear a better one that filters inbound properly and everybody gets to do what they want.
What's interesting about this is the psychology of why intelligent people have swallowed this. Do they believe the mask is filtering inbound when it isn't? Or is it entirely political - signalling membership of a group to others. Or is it that the perennially worried believe they should have the right to tell others what they can and can't do, when there is a perfectly reasonably 'live and let live' option available.
Why choose a position that divides society when there is one that brings people together?
You have no idea whether you are 'protecting others' or just creating plastic waste for no good reason. Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect whatsoever in the real world. No deflection in rates can be seen from NPIs and the process leaks like crazy.
It's entirely a backward belief. Believing you are 'protecting others', yet doing nothing to protect yourself against the almost certain risk that other people won't be 'protecting others'.
None of it makes any sense in any logical analysis.
Huh? You need to protect others because masks (mostly) don't work inbound, that's what I'm saying. (But do work outbound.)
> Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect
Sorry, restate: the presence of masks is trivial to validate.
Aerosol transmission.
It won't. In an hour the air will fill with the virus if someone is infected. The original virus apparently took 15 minutes to infect in a room. If delta is minimum 6x more infectious we are talking minutes.
By increasing air circulation, or meeting outside, we can reduce infections much more than if 30 people are wearing a mask inside a room for an hour.
Deliberate misleading may be worse than a mistake, but it probably wasn't because of the scientific method.
During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision.
We always need to reason under uncertainty. The correct interpretation of the scientific method would have led to the conclusion that COVID was likely to be transmitted via aerosols (e.g. due to sequence similarity with other coronaviruses, which are known to be transmitted via aerosols) and imposing mandatory masks (because this is a very innocuous intervention).