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.
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!