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.