4 ms·

Osterholm's claims are not supported by the evidence. He claims to respect aerosol scientists, but doesn't have any on his team and none have been involved in h

• timr 6y ago
  "Osterholm has never written any paper about community mask wearing. He is not an informed authority on this issue" And neither are you. Your "paper" on the subject is a joke. I've read it, and I've read the source literature you cite. It is a series of sloppy misinterpretations and mis-representations of the other papers, coupled with the results of running an ad hoc epidemiological model with questionable parameters. It is a quora post, written up like a paper, and pushed to a pre-print server. You cite papers that are rated by Cochrane (and others) as low-quality, as if they are reliable evidence. You dismiss papers that do not support your conclusions for "lack of evidence", but deflect similar criticisms of your own conclusions with "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Quite simply: your analysis wouldn't pass muster at even a third-rate journal, and Osterholm has rightly called you out on it. It's especially ironic that you say that Osterholm is not an "informed authority" -- he leads one of the country's leading research institutes on infectious disease, has a long history in epidemiology and public health, and spends the better part of an hour-long podcast specifically describing his experience and outlining areas where he has no specific expertise. Say what you want about the man, but he is rigorously honest about his experience. Yet I regularly see you cited as a "mask expert". Where did you do your research, again? Was it when you were getting a philosophy degree, or when you were at Fastmail? Maybe Kaggle has a mask competition? As for the papers you've cited here: the first link you cite can't separate the effects of social distancing, gloves, masks, and other interventions, and finds mainly that people who take precautions against infection have better outcomes than those who don't. When they actually try to break out masks, specifically, they find that they don't have any effect after illness onset, which should make you doubt legitimacy of the results. The second link provides no evidence for masks. It is a modeling study. The third link has the same problem as the first, but worse: it can't possibly separate the effect of masks from everything else that was happening in the examined states at the same time. There is no control.
• DanBC 6y ago
  Your lancet article has one mention of the word "mask", and says this: > We are also unable to explicitly decompose physical distancing measures into constituent components, such as staying 2 m apart, increased hand washing, and face mask wearing, as the relative effectiveness of these components has not yet been estimated. Did you post the right link?
  • giardini 6y ago
    DanBC is correct: why is he being downvoted?