8 ms·

Face masks considerably reduce Covid-19 cases in Germany

115 points by _Microft 6y ago

_Microft 6y ago
As dynamic as the development is, I think including the month of publication in Corona-related submissions might not be the worst idea. The paper is open access by the way.
- prof-dr-ir 6y ago
  I actually think that you highlighted the wrong date: this paper was put online in June, received for review in July, approved in November, and published in December. June version: http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf
charliebrownau 6y ago
A: Convid is less leathal then yearly flu B: Face marks ACTUALLY increase germs/infection MORE C: Its a global convid PLANDEMIC and Hoaxdown by 170 nations Look at the actual DEATHS compared to yearly deaths of FLU and other death rates
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
redis_mlc 6y ago
> Mitigating the spread of COVID-19 is the objective of most governments. It's not a practical goal in the US, where COVID-19 is endemic. Wearing masks is not going to accomplish anything, since it will just flare up again with our poor contact testing and tracing. In addition, likely half of Americans have no intention of taking a vaccine.
guest345678901 6y ago
Heard in TV, all infectious disease numbers are down here this year. I wonder whether we will ever get back to touching non-family people, just to be friendly. Feel bad sometimes for kids growing up now. Not sure what long-term effects of distancing and so much obedience will be.
- tehlike 6y ago
  I would not mind. When we get back to office, cubicles will be way more problematic than a handshake.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
  It will probably take time but we've been here before as human race while knowing how infectious diseases spread. I am a bit worried for the children in delicate age right now who need to learn right now socializing, seeing human emotions, train their immunity systems etc. Adults can have gap year or more, different with children.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  > whether we will ever get back to touching non-family people, I've been invited to three orgies, with dates TBD ("as soon as this ('gestures around') is over", one says). So maybe we'll have an entirely newfound appreciation of touch.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    ... I didn't know that was a thing. I'm naïve.
    - ramraj07 6y ago
      Or, you've not been infected by the idiota-virus that's spreading through apparently 90% of the population where everyone's trying their best to make up for lost time by such activities.
      - titzer 6y ago
        The Moronavirus is not a hoax...been here for a while.
- agent008t 6y ago
  The Japanese have had more sensible traditions around (not) touching strangers I think. Wouldn't be the worst thing if those are adopted elsewhere. Hugging strangers like in the US or kissing when you meet people like in some places in the middle east is odd in comparison.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
WildParser 6y ago
Oh no, not again this fake-paper... In Jena there were about one dozend(?) infected people when masks were introduced. And the imaginary trend-change there doesn't even fit - it is too early. The paper talks about "announcement effect". Fact is that other places with real outbreaks (>10 times more cases than Jena) never saw any trend-change from masks. It is even very likely that the effect is going in the other direction. Even if you look hard, nowhere is it getting better - but there are quite a lot of places with massive trend-breaks in the wrong direction. Reasons: - Lures old people together without proper protection - good way to transmit even without being infected - breathing through contaminated masks is not good. - contaminating mask is easy Honestly, would anybody want doctors to walk around the city with their contaminated masks from hospital? That's what you get from general mask use - Healthy people - exhaling virus. In some regions the trend-changes from mask mandates look like someone turned on the turbo.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Indeed, correlation between measures and outcomes is all over the place. We (Lithuania) are in the second lockdown since Nov 7th, masks are mandatory even outside, pubs/restaurants/cafes/gyms etc. are closed, all events canceled, there is restriction how many people can meet: used to be up to five, now only two — and we are still hitting our record numbers of cases. Slovenia had even public transport and schools closed, cases still climbing.
  - fbr 6y ago
    The lockdown looks quite effective in France [1]. I believe they have started at the beginning of November. [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
    - rimliu 6y ago
      I did not check (and probably will not), but I have a suspicion that countries that had it "easy" in the spring are hit harder now. Those who were hit hard in the spring may have some kind of herd immunity among the most social active and hence have it easier now.
timeeater 6y ago
In April, more than half of infections in Germany happened in nursing homes and hospitals. Also, iirc it was very unevenly spread across regions (also consider that often it was superspreader events that drove up the numbers, it was not a even distribution across the whole population). That makes me suspicious of the paper, as there may be many confounding variables, and small sample sizes. People may also have started using maskes or other measures before the government mandate, especially the professionals in nursing homes and hospitals.
prof-dr-ir 6y ago
If you are looking for convincing evidence in favour of mask wearing - this paper is not it. It bases its conclusion on a few hundred cases in the German city of Jena back in April. In fact, the authors themselves apply the same analysis to other cities over the same time period (figure S15 in the supplementary material) and those plots show hardly any effect. However... if a paper claims to support X and the paper is bad, then that does not mean that X is incorrect. And given government advice around the world, it seems pretty clear that masks are understood to do more good than harm.
- parineum 6y ago
  > And given government advice around the world, it seems pretty clear that masks are understood to do more good than harm. That's an appeal to authority. It also doesn't mean it's incorrect but it's not evidence of anything.
  - prof-dr-ir 6y ago
    I used 'understood' because it is what I believe the scientific consensus to be. Since I do not use this for anything else, there is no 'appeal to authority' in my original comment. That said, let me double down and state that I wholeheartedly recommend using the scientific consensus as a prior for your opinion on any given topic. :)
  - krageon 6y ago
    An appeal to authority is a good reason to believe something if the authority can be understood to be knowledgeable. It's especially useful in cases where your readers can't all be expected to understand the nuances of the decision making involved and you want to avoid appealing to emotions (which works better). What basically never works are appeals to logic, frequently even here (a place which explicitly stimulates it). The reasons for why it doesn't work here (miles of text with pedantic arguing, usually not a lot of substance) are different for why it won't work in public (people don't feel like doing that with you, usually) but they are there. Especially in a case such as this an appeal to authority can be useful, as there is a big bad-faith storm of "discussion" surrounding the subject that really isn't doing anyone any favours.
Wintamute 6y ago
Massive confounding factor here is that starting around April seasonality into summer was putting massive downward pressure on the epidemic across Europe anyway. There's no mention of attempting to control for this effect in the paper. As it happens the UK's second wave kicked into exponential increase around mid August - the only major public health policy intervention coincident with this was mandatory mask wearing. So yeah.
- tikkabhuna 6y ago
  Mid-August was also half way into "Eat out to help out"[1]. 1 - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/get-a-discount-with-the-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme https://www.gov.uk/guidance/get-a-discount-with-the-eat-out-...
  - regularfry 6y ago
    Not only that, but back-projections of R0 across summer show a distinct upwards turn from below 1.0 at the start of August, exactly when EOtHO started.
- doctorfoo 6y ago
  It was July the lockdown was lifted and pubs and restaurants were reopened. I think that counts as major.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Anecdotal, but my city made masks mandatory both indoors and outdoors about a month ago with €250 fine for non-compliance. Other measures roughly stayed the same. Prior to that, roughly one in every 88 people were considered to be active cases. Today, that number is one in every 121. Of course this is just my rough calculation (latest population census divided by the number of active cases), and the number is expected to improve somewhat as the amount of population with antibodies increases, but I'm pretty sure masks help.
- klmr 6y ago
  > Massive confounding factor here is that starting around April seasonality … was putting massive downward pressure on the epidemic. That’s wrong, the opposite is the case. The study controls for this by looking at a synthetic control over the same time period, which consists of other populations without mandatory mask-wearing. It’s an observational study so it can’t control for everything but it does control for seasonality, even if “seasonality” isn’t specifically mentioned in the paper.
mrweasel 6y ago
That seems a little weird, given that a large Danish study says that masks doesn't reduce your risk of infection in a significant way. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
- mstokholm 6y ago
  Keep in mind that these are two slightly different things. Masks might not reduce your personal risk of infection, but they might reduce the risk of you infecting others. In either case, you would see a reduction in the total amount of transmission.
  - geomark 6y ago
    Are people still confused that the reason you wear a mask is not to protect yourself directly, but to protect others thereby indirectly protecting yourself? It seems so, because in the west people are still arguing about wearing masks, and doing these inane studies, while in Asia people wear masks and go about their business as usual.
    - bzb6 6y ago
      What do you call the west? Here in Spain we are mandated by law to wear them, there’s no arguing (or freedom)
      - geomark 6y ago
        Yes, you're right of course. "The west" is a big place with many different moving parts, just like Asia. So things aren't the same everywhere. It's just that there are many western countries where the arguments about mask wearing and social distancing are still going on while the pandemic is raging while in most of Asia that isn't happening and the pandemic has largely been nipped in the bud.
    - regularfry 6y ago
      I do wonder how much of that is because Japan (and China, to a certain degree) had normalised mask wearing well before this year.
ramraj07 6y ago
One thing I noticed with nearly everyone, both in the real world and in tv, is that people still don't seem to understand a simple issue: wearing a mask 90% of the time is more or less as good as wearing no mask at all. If you're sitting in a room or flight with a mask but open it to drink water and eat food, you've mostly ruined all the protection you tried to gain with the mask. You only need one drop of yogurt to spoil a vat of milk, this is no different.
- thepangolino 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure 90% of the people wearing masks don't do it because they're worried about themselves. They do it either plainly for legal reasons or because they believe it help protect others. If I were that concerned about my own health, I wouldn't be wearing the same unwashed cloth mask for weeks. (I'm vaccinated against a whole bunch of pneumococcus and respiratory diseases)
- brmgb 6y ago
  That's completely false. People are not surgeons. The goal is not to maintain a sterile environment. The masks people generally use are not even rated for that. The situation is simple. With airborn virus, people will get contaminated when they come into contact with droplets containing virus. Given the typical viral load of people having Covid-19, the issue will mostly be with large droplets. These droplets are stoped by masks. Of course, you are going to emit droplets when you are drinking or eating but far less than than you would have not wearing a mask at all. The point is not to gain protection. It's to limit your chance of contaminating other people if you are asymptomatic.
- titzer 6y ago
  There is such a thing as viral load [1] [1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/88692 https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/88692
lumberingjack 6y ago
So desperate to try to prove a point when science says repeatedly shown improperly wearing a mask is worse than not wearing a mask and everyone I see in the public is in violation of MOPP
- trabant00 6y ago
  > improperly wearing a mask is worse than not wearing a mask Please explain or link.
  - krageon 6y ago
    This is a right-wing "back to normal" meme and can therefore not be expected to come with coherent explanations.
thepangolino 6y ago
Can anyone have a look at the graphs in this article below and point out why and how mask were effective? https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/these-12-graphs-show-mask-mandates-do-nothing-to-stop-covid/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/these-12-graphs-show-ma... EDIT: I would appreciate a proper rebuttal instead of what I can only interpret as downvotes for wrongthink.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  Your link is from a bad source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(website)
- klmr 6y ago
  Refusal to engage with Gish gallop [1] does not validate the claims you’ve linked. This isn’t “wrongthink”, it’s a sign that you’ve posted a laughably bad source. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Those charts do not show any information regarding the effectiveness or otherwise of mask wearing. There is no information about what proportion of the populations actually wore masks, how close people actually got to each other, what the population density and degree of urbanization is, etc. In Norway we mostly have not had strict lockdowns and have not had compulsory mask wearing until very recently and our infection rates and death rates are lower than most other countries as shown on the charts. But you need to be careful how you interpret that; Norway has a relatively low population density and a large proportion of jobs are of a type that can be done at home. So pretty much everyone who could work from home immediately did so (a lot did anyway). We also have a strong tradition of solidarity; unlike the UK 'We're all in this together!' is not just a slogan. Our government has also been largely consistent in the advice that it has issued and, with a couple of exceptions, avoided overreacting which means that people are willing to adhere to the rules even though most are just advice and not enforceable. Most charts from all sources, and especially things like the Federalist, should be taken with a shovel of salt; not because of what they include but because of all the information that is omitted.
yason 6y ago
My uneducated perception is that the most effective factor seems to be the people's own adapted behaviour itself. When the situation gets worse then not only the top smartest people but also larger masses begin to take it more seriously to protect themselves, keeping distance, and omitting trips and reducing contacts. This obviously doesn't apply to careless people or "non-believers" but they wouldn't be much affected by regulations either. So there's always (hopefully) a minority of the population where the virus can spread more easily but once the majority successfully does react it will show positively in the growth curves within about 10 days. Coincidentally this is also the same time where governments impose strong recommendations or even enforce counter measures. Mandatory shutdowns of cafes and restaurants might seem an effective ordinance but the truth is that by that time most people already refrain from going to crowded places such as cafes and restaurants. And usually there's at least a few points of empirical data from neighbouring countries that those same counter-measures alone won't help limiting the growth if the people themselves aren't in it. It only takes one mask-wearing country to not recover from infection growth in order to make it questionable whether masks help much at all. Keeping distance seems much more effective than masks. In reality, I've seen that when masks became common place people partially reverted back to flocking together and not respecting a good radius of personal space anymore. Masks probably won't hurt if you need to be close to other people but it would be much, much better to keep the distance in the first place.
- hu3 6y ago
  The extra care makes a difference. Anedoctally my family did not catch cold or flu since first hearing about the possibility of the pandemy. At least not symptomatic. > When the situation gets worse then not only the top smartest people but also larger masses begin to take it more seriously to protect themselves, keeping distance, and omitting trips and reducing contacts.
- forest_dweller 6y ago
  > Keeping distance seems much more effective than masks. In reality, I've seen that when masks became common place people partially reverted back to flocking together and not respecting a good radius of personal space anymore. Masks probably won't hurt if you need to be close to other people but it would be much, much better to keep the distance in the first place. I've noticed this when visiting the shops daily when I get my lunch. Before mask were mandated, almost everyone kept each other at a distance. Since mask wearing people have barely bothered. I've mentioned this to friends on my discord server. Some are from Europe or elsewhere in the UK and they have noticed the same.
richardARPANET 6y ago
The average age of those killed by COVID-19 is 83 years old.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  What is your point?
  - anoncake 6y ago
    I think their point is obvious but off-topic.
ladino 6y ago
beside: Germany did not wear masks on the first shutdown in spring (same as Danmark and Sweden) - the were not available and they came as the spread already went down heading summer. As for the headline, Germany has a strict shutdown at the moment.
- lnsru 6y ago
  Germany does not have any strict shutdown. National mobility isn’t limited and all shops are open. The gathering of people is kinda limited, but nobody controls it.
lixtra 6y ago
To summarize the paper: The authors compute a sophisticated average of German cities and compare the weighted number of positive SARS-CoV-2 tests to the city of Jena for a timespan of one month starting just before masks became obligatory there (6th April). Masks did not become obligatory elsewhere and roughly around the mask obligation new positive cases drastically reduced in Jena whereas the weighted average shows no such effect. EDIT: moved my doubts in the study into extra comment. If you think the summary is wrong, please leave a comment pointing out in which way, after downvoting.
- lixtra 6y ago
  Since I seem to get downvoted for adding doubt to the paper in my comment, I move it here: The study does not look into other east German cities like Weimar[1] or Rostock that showed a similar drop in positive tests without mask obligations. New positive tests in Jena recently reached an all time high. [2] [1] https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20weimar/ https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20weimar/ [2] https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20jena/ https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20jena/
- w0utert 6y ago
  Thanks for the summary, this confirms what I already suspected, which is that these kinds of studies are pretty much useless to correlate anything with anything. On top of that it seems the study hypotheses for these papers are clearly biased towards proving a positive correlation between infections and mask use, even though one could do exactly the same kind of study in many other parts of the world where infections exploded along with increasingly expansive mask mandates. For example France and Spain, where numbers only started to go down after they went into second lockdown. No matter what you think of mask effectiveness, cherry picking statistics is bad science, and so far that’s all I’ve seen as far as the ‘masks are effective’ studies go.
- georgeplusplus 6y ago
  >> Masks did not become obligatory elsewhere I have to challenge this assessment from the article. Masks did become mandatory elsewhere. Mostly in targeted spots in the cities such as the zeil in Frankfurt and Potsdamer platz in Berlin and I can tell you that it is met with strict enforcement and that people are adhering to the rule ardently with very few exceptions. The article and much of the science leaves much to be desired. It is my opinion that the “all or nothing” pro mask people are actually obstructing the science. Their intolerance to confront or question evidence that is contradictory or unexplained anomalies in the data such as this article is dangerous to actually having the right response to covid leads to nonsensical draconian rules like the California mayor suggesting requiring wearing a mask 24 hours a day and only removing between bites when eating.
cm2187 6y ago
Seems pretty much a worthless analysis to me. Facemasks were introduced in April, infection went down in April, masks worked! Except that this virus seems highly seasonal and spring also came in April! Where are the "if it's not a double blind study where you isolate a variable, you haven't proven anything" people when we need them!
- klmr 6y ago
  > Except that this virus seems highly seasonal and spring also came in April! This effect is controlled for by the study, by comparing Jena to synthetic control groups.
- La1n 6y ago
  >Where are the "if it's not a double blind study where you isolate a variable, you haven't proven anything" people when we need them! Yes if only we had a second Earth.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Exactly the same argument against waiting 3 months for randomized studies to use a drug against an epidemic. If only one could press the pause button on the epidemic.
mfDjB 6y ago
I find it weird that science can't conclusively answer the question "is wearing a face mask going to significantly reduce the spread of covid". It's been nearly a year since this was a known disease, and beyond that masks have been around for a long time and they are used by the medical community to some degree. How can we not know based on the shear mechanics of these two entities whether this is effective? I feel like every other day there is a new study or report that refutes the study or the report I just saw from another respected institution. I'm not surprised people are frustrated at this problem. As an example, look at this study that was posted just 13 days ago on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159583
- raverbashing 6y ago
  You're right, it should be better. The Danish study is not good. They're not controlling for mask/no mask, they're controlling for suggestion to use masks (and they didn't even go back and ask "did you wear a mask or not). In the end it seems people are more worried in publishing hastly prepared experiments/results than worrying about getting to the bottom of things. > How can we not know based on the shear mechanics of these two entities whether this is effective? It seems obvious to me that masks have a positive effect. A mechanical barrier is better than nothing. "Oh but influenza" Influenza and Coronaviruses are different Doctors and Dentists don't use masks because they think it's funny or comfortable
  - ghthor 6y ago
    Doctors and dentists use masks because they dont want spit ending up in there patients.
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      It goes both ways, due to the sublingual glands. Especially when tongue depression or other procedures might trigger a release of saliva, or make the saliva in the mouth spread. Or cough. Or sneezes. If you were a doctor, would you be happy seeing a patient with a weird cough without masks/eye protection?
temptemptemp111 6y ago
They increase bacterial infections you sheep.
smokey_circles 6y ago
Masks are a pointless waste of time when it comes to containing the pandemic. Yes yes, I know. Just let me explain. Masks DO help prevent the range particles can travel when you breathe. I'm not arguing that. The fact is, however, they're useless in comparison to the ACTUAL champions of prevention. And that would largely be hygiene. I'm willing to bet 99% of you reading this do not clean your fingernails properly while washing your hands. Which is fine, THAT'S how good soap is. Doing it poorly is orders of magnitude better than not doing it all. Is the same true of masks? Absolutely not. If you don't wear a mask properly, it's useless. It gets worse with specialised gear, like the N95s. You need to be trained on how to fit, test and adjust that. Have a beard? Not gonna work. Small leak out the top? Nope, it's buggered. You ever notice how developing nations struggle with higher infant mortality rates, caused by preventable communicative diseases like cholera? It's because they don't wash their hands with soap. Soap is literally a life saver [0]. There's a damned good chance it's saved you a nasty infection, if not your life, directly or otherwise. It's strange to me we understand why gloves aren't effective, but somehow that logic gets lost when masks pop up. If you don't know how to stop yourself from contaminating your environment, you're really not getting anything from wearing a mask. Or gloves. Or scrubs. China is a fantastic example of this. They just ignored the whole "human rights" problem and went straight to welding people into their own homes [1]. Highly effective. Conversely, they'd been wearing masks for a long time because of their air pollution. Clearly not very effective. (The point here is the behavior and the objective is more important than the mask). Here's what we should be focusing our energy on: 1. Social Distancing 2. Wash your hands properly [2] 3. Coughing etiquette 4. And then, finally, PPE including masks. If you don't know how to use gloves properly, then don't waste your money (because we all seem to forget economics is also a problem to solve here). JUST focusing on masks won't cut it. Rather focus on JUST washing your hands then. You will see a much larger return on investment there. That evidence is also irrefutable. Compare the rate of death from communicable diseases in areas where washing with soap is prevalent to areas where it is not. SARS-CoV-2 has a lipid bi-layer, so soap will destroy it. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587156/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587156/ [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLIFT9xoWSQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLIFT9xoWSQ the key bit here is scrape your nails against your hands when they're full of soap, so that the soap gets UNDER your nails too. Germs are tiny, and everywhere. So get em good

115 points by _Microft 6y ago

As dynamic as the development is, I think including the month of publication in Corona-related submissions might not be the worst idea. The paper is open access by the way.

prof-dr-ir 6y ago
I actually think that you highlighted the wrong date: this paper was put online in June, received for review in July, approved in November, and published in December. June version: http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf

charliebrownau 6y ago

A: Convid is less leathal then yearly flu B: Face marks ACTUALLY increase germs/infection MORE C: Its a global convid PLANDEMIC and Hoaxdown by 170 nations Look at the actual DEATHS compared to yearly deaths of FLU and other death rates

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

redis_mlc 6y ago

> Mitigating the spread of COVID-19 is the objective of most governments. It's not a practical goal in the US, where COVID-19 is endemic. Wearing masks is not going to accomplish anything, since it will just flare up again with our poor contact testing and tracing. In addition, likely half of Americans have no intention of taking a vaccine.

guest345678901 6y ago

Heard in TV, all infectious disease numbers are down here this year. I wonder whether we will ever get back to touching non-family people, just to be friendly. Feel bad sometimes for kids growing up now. Not sure what long-term effects of distancing and so much obedience will be.

tehlike 6y ago
I would not mind. When we get back to office, cubicles will be way more problematic than a handshake.
9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
It will probably take time but we've been here before as human race while knowing how infectious diseases spread. I am a bit worried for the children in delicate age right now who need to learn right now socializing, seeing human emotions, train their immunity systems etc. Adults can have gap year or more, different with children.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
> whether we will ever get back to touching non-family people, I've been invited to three orgies, with dates TBD ("as soon as this ('gestures around') is over", one says). So maybe we'll have an entirely newfound appreciation of touch.
- jacobush 6y ago
  ... I didn't know that was a thing. I'm naïve.
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    Or, you've not been infected by the idiota-virus that's spreading through apparently 90% of the population where everyone's trying their best to make up for lost time by such activities.
    - titzer 6y ago
      The Moronavirus is not a hoax...been here for a while.
agent008t 6y ago
The Japanese have had more sensible traditions around (not) touching strangers I think. Wouldn't be the worst thing if those are adopted elsewhere. Hugging strangers like in the US or kissing when you meet people like in some places in the middle east is odd in comparison.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

WildParser 6y ago

Oh no, not again this fake-paper... In Jena there were about one dozend(?) infected people when masks were introduced. And the imaginary trend-change there doesn't even fit - it is too early. The paper talks about "announcement effect". Fact is that other places with real outbreaks (>10 times more cases than Jena) never saw any trend-change from masks. It is even very likely that the effect is going in the other direction. Even if you look hard, nowhere is it getting better - but there are quite a lot of places with massive trend-breaks in the wrong direction. Reasons: - Lures old people together without proper protection - good way to transmit even without being infected - breathing through contaminated masks is not good. - contaminating mask is easy Honestly, would anybody want doctors to walk around the city with their contaminated masks from hospital? That's what you get from general mask use - Healthy people - exhaling virus. In some regions the trend-changes from mask mandates look like someone turned on the turbo.

rimliu 6y ago
Indeed, correlation between measures and outcomes is all over the place. We (Lithuania) are in the second lockdown since Nov 7th, masks are mandatory even outside, pubs/restaurants/cafes/gyms etc. are closed, all events canceled, there is restriction how many people can meet: used to be up to five, now only two — and we are still hitting our record numbers of cases. Slovenia had even public transport and schools closed, cases still climbing.
- fbr 6y ago
  The lockdown looks quite effective in France [1]. I believe they have started at the beginning of November. [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
  - rimliu 6y ago
    I did not check (and probably will not), but I have a suspicion that countries that had it "easy" in the spring are hit harder now. Those who were hit hard in the spring may have some kind of herd immunity among the most social active and hence have it easier now.

timeeater 6y ago

In April, more than half of infections in Germany happened in nursing homes and hospitals. Also, iirc it was very unevenly spread across regions (also consider that often it was superspreader events that drove up the numbers, it was not a even distribution across the whole population). That makes me suspicious of the paper, as there may be many confounding variables, and small sample sizes. People may also have started using maskes or other measures before the government mandate, especially the professionals in nursing homes and hospitals.

prof-dr-ir 6y ago

If you are looking for convincing evidence in favour of mask wearing - this paper is not it. It bases its conclusion on a few hundred cases in the German city of Jena back in April. In fact, the authors themselves apply the same analysis to other cities over the same time period (figure S15 in the supplementary material) and those plots show hardly any effect. However... if a paper claims to support X and the paper is bad, then that does not mean that X is incorrect. And given government advice around the world, it seems pretty clear that masks are understood to do more good than harm.

parineum 6y ago
> And given government advice around the world, it seems pretty clear that masks are understood to do more good than harm. That's an appeal to authority. It also doesn't mean it's incorrect but it's not evidence of anything.
- prof-dr-ir 6y ago
  I used 'understood' because it is what I believe the scientific consensus to be. Since I do not use this for anything else, there is no 'appeal to authority' in my original comment. That said, let me double down and state that I wholeheartedly recommend using the scientific consensus as a prior for your opinion on any given topic. :)
- krageon 6y ago
  An appeal to authority is a good reason to believe something if the authority can be understood to be knowledgeable. It's especially useful in cases where your readers can't all be expected to understand the nuances of the decision making involved and you want to avoid appealing to emotions (which works better). What basically never works are appeals to logic, frequently even here (a place which explicitly stimulates it). The reasons for why it doesn't work here (miles of text with pedantic arguing, usually not a lot of substance) are different for why it won't work in public (people don't feel like doing that with you, usually) but they are there. Especially in a case such as this an appeal to authority can be useful, as there is a big bad-faith storm of "discussion" surrounding the subject that really isn't doing anyone any favours.

Wintamute 6y ago

Massive confounding factor here is that starting around April seasonality into summer was putting massive downward pressure on the epidemic across Europe anyway. There's no mention of attempting to control for this effect in the paper. As it happens the UK's second wave kicked into exponential increase around mid August - the only major public health policy intervention coincident with this was mandatory mask wearing. So yeah.

tikkabhuna 6y ago
Mid-August was also half way into "Eat out to help out"[1]. 1 - https://www.gov.uk/guidance/get-a-discount-with-the-eat-out-to-help-out-scheme https://www.gov.uk/guidance/get-a-discount-with-the-eat-out-...
- regularfry 6y ago
  Not only that, but back-projections of R0 across summer show a distinct upwards turn from below 1.0 at the start of August, exactly when EOtHO started.
doctorfoo 6y ago
It was July the lockdown was lifted and pubs and restaurants were reopened. I think that counts as major.
input_sh 6y ago
Anecdotal, but my city made masks mandatory both indoors and outdoors about a month ago with €250 fine for non-compliance. Other measures roughly stayed the same. Prior to that, roughly one in every 88 people were considered to be active cases. Today, that number is one in every 121. Of course this is just my rough calculation (latest population census divided by the number of active cases), and the number is expected to improve somewhat as the amount of population with antibodies increases, but I'm pretty sure masks help.
klmr 6y ago
> Massive confounding factor here is that starting around April seasonality … was putting massive downward pressure on the epidemic. That’s wrong, the opposite is the case. The study controls for this by looking at a synthetic control over the same time period, which consists of other populations without mandatory mask-wearing. It’s an observational study so it can’t control for everything but it does control for seasonality, even if “seasonality” isn’t specifically mentioned in the paper.

mrweasel 6y ago

That seems a little weird, given that a large Danish study says that masks doesn't reduce your risk of infection in a significant way. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

mstokholm 6y ago
Keep in mind that these are two slightly different things. Masks might not reduce your personal risk of infection, but they might reduce the risk of you infecting others. In either case, you would see a reduction in the total amount of transmission.
- geomark 6y ago
  Are people still confused that the reason you wear a mask is not to protect yourself directly, but to protect others thereby indirectly protecting yourself? It seems so, because in the west people are still arguing about wearing masks, and doing these inane studies, while in Asia people wear masks and go about their business as usual.
  - bzb6 6y ago
    What do you call the west? Here in Spain we are mandated by law to wear them, there’s no arguing (or freedom)
    - geomark 6y ago
      Yes, you're right of course. "The west" is a big place with many different moving parts, just like Asia. So things aren't the same everywhere. It's just that there are many western countries where the arguments about mask wearing and social distancing are still going on while the pandemic is raging while in most of Asia that isn't happening and the pandemic has largely been nipped in the bud.
  - regularfry 6y ago
    I do wonder how much of that is because Japan (and China, to a certain degree) had normalised mask wearing well before this year.

ramraj07 6y ago

One thing I noticed with nearly everyone, both in the real world and in tv, is that people still don't seem to understand a simple issue: wearing a mask 90% of the time is more or less as good as wearing no mask at all. If you're sitting in a room or flight with a mask but open it to drink water and eat food, you've mostly ruined all the protection you tried to gain with the mask. You only need one drop of yogurt to spoil a vat of milk, this is no different.

thepangolino 6y ago
I'm pretty sure 90% of the people wearing masks don't do it because they're worried about themselves. They do it either plainly for legal reasons or because they believe it help protect others. If I were that concerned about my own health, I wouldn't be wearing the same unwashed cloth mask for weeks. (I'm vaccinated against a whole bunch of pneumococcus and respiratory diseases)
brmgb 6y ago
That's completely false. People are not surgeons. The goal is not to maintain a sterile environment. The masks people generally use are not even rated for that. The situation is simple. With airborn virus, people will get contaminated when they come into contact with droplets containing virus. Given the typical viral load of people having Covid-19, the issue will mostly be with large droplets. These droplets are stoped by masks. Of course, you are going to emit droplets when you are drinking or eating but far less than than you would have not wearing a mask at all. The point is not to gain protection. It's to limit your chance of contaminating other people if you are asymptomatic.
titzer 6y ago
There is such a thing as viral load [1] [1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/88692 https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/88692

lumberingjack 6y ago

So desperate to try to prove a point when science says repeatedly shown improperly wearing a mask is worse than not wearing a mask and everyone I see in the public is in violation of MOPP

trabant00 6y ago
> improperly wearing a mask is worse than not wearing a mask Please explain or link.
- krageon 6y ago
  This is a right-wing "back to normal" meme and can therefore not be expected to come with coherent explanations.

thepangolino 6y ago

Can anyone have a look at the graphs in this article below and point out why and how mask were effective? https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/these-12-graphs-show-mask-mandates-do-nothing-to-stop-covid/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/these-12-graphs-show-ma... EDIT: I would appreciate a proper rebuttal instead of what I can only interpret as downvotes for wrongthink.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago
Your link is from a bad source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_(website)
klmr 6y ago
Refusal to engage with Gish gallop [1] does not validate the claims you’ve linked. This isn’t “wrongthink”, it’s a sign that you’ve posted a laughably bad source. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Those charts do not show any information regarding the effectiveness or otherwise of mask wearing. There is no information about what proportion of the populations actually wore masks, how close people actually got to each other, what the population density and degree of urbanization is, etc. In Norway we mostly have not had strict lockdowns and have not had compulsory mask wearing until very recently and our infection rates and death rates are lower than most other countries as shown on the charts. But you need to be careful how you interpret that; Norway has a relatively low population density and a large proportion of jobs are of a type that can be done at home. So pretty much everyone who could work from home immediately did so (a lot did anyway). We also have a strong tradition of solidarity; unlike the UK 'We're all in this together!' is not just a slogan. Our government has also been largely consistent in the advice that it has issued and, with a couple of exceptions, avoided overreacting which means that people are willing to adhere to the rules even though most are just advice and not enforceable. Most charts from all sources, and especially things like the Federalist, should be taken with a shovel of salt; not because of what they include but because of all the information that is omitted.

yason 6y ago

My uneducated perception is that the most effective factor seems to be the people's own adapted behaviour itself. When the situation gets worse then not only the top smartest people but also larger masses begin to take it more seriously to protect themselves, keeping distance, and omitting trips and reducing contacts. This obviously doesn't apply to careless people or "non-believers" but they wouldn't be much affected by regulations either. So there's always (hopefully) a minority of the population where the virus can spread more easily but once the majority successfully does react it will show positively in the growth curves within about 10 days. Coincidentally this is also the same time where governments impose strong recommendations or even enforce counter measures. Mandatory shutdowns of cafes and restaurants might seem an effective ordinance but the truth is that by that time most people already refrain from going to crowded places such as cafes and restaurants. And usually there's at least a few points of empirical data from neighbouring countries that those same counter-measures alone won't help limiting the growth if the people themselves aren't in it. It only takes one mask-wearing country to not recover from infection growth in order to make it questionable whether masks help much at all. Keeping distance seems much more effective than masks. In reality, I've seen that when masks became common place people partially reverted back to flocking together and not respecting a good radius of personal space anymore. Masks probably won't hurt if you need to be close to other people but it would be much, much better to keep the distance in the first place.

hu3 6y ago
The extra care makes a difference. Anedoctally my family did not catch cold or flu since first hearing about the possibility of the pandemy. At least not symptomatic. > When the situation gets worse then not only the top smartest people but also larger masses begin to take it more seriously to protect themselves, keeping distance, and omitting trips and reducing contacts.
forest_dweller 6y ago
> Keeping distance seems much more effective than masks. In reality, I've seen that when masks became common place people partially reverted back to flocking together and not respecting a good radius of personal space anymore. Masks probably won't hurt if you need to be close to other people but it would be much, much better to keep the distance in the first place. I've noticed this when visiting the shops daily when I get my lunch. Before mask were mandated, almost everyone kept each other at a distance. Since mask wearing people have barely bothered. I've mentioned this to friends on my discord server. Some are from Europe or elsewhere in the UK and they have noticed the same.

richardARPANET 6y ago

The average age of those killed by COVID-19 is 83 years old.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago
What is your point?
- anoncake 6y ago
  I think their point is obvious but off-topic.

ladino 6y ago

beside: Germany did not wear masks on the first shutdown in spring (same as Danmark and Sweden) - the were not available and they came as the spread already went down heading summer. As for the headline, Germany has a strict shutdown at the moment.

lnsru 6y ago
Germany does not have any strict shutdown. National mobility isn’t limited and all shops are open. The gathering of people is kinda limited, but nobody controls it.

lixtra 6y ago

To summarize the paper: The authors compute a sophisticated average of German cities and compare the weighted number of positive SARS-CoV-2 tests to the city of Jena for a timespan of one month starting just before masks became obligatory there (6th April). Masks did not become obligatory elsewhere and roughly around the mask obligation new positive cases drastically reduced in Jena whereas the weighted average shows no such effect. EDIT: moved my doubts in the study into extra comment. If you think the summary is wrong, please leave a comment pointing out in which way, after downvoting.

lixtra 6y ago
Since I seem to get downvoted for adding doubt to the paper in my comment, I move it here: The study does not look into other east German cities like Weimar[1] or Rostock that showed a similar drop in positive tests without mask obligations. New positive tests in Jena recently reached an all time high. [2] [1] https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20weimar/ https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20weimar/ [2] https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20jena/ https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20jena/
w0utert 6y ago
Thanks for the summary, this confirms what I already suspected, which is that these kinds of studies are pretty much useless to correlate anything with anything. On top of that it seems the study hypotheses for these papers are clearly biased towards proving a positive correlation between infections and mask use, even though one could do exactly the same kind of study in many other parts of the world where infections exploded along with increasingly expansive mask mandates. For example France and Spain, where numbers only started to go down after they went into second lockdown. No matter what you think of mask effectiveness, cherry picking statistics is bad science, and so far that’s all I’ve seen as far as the ‘masks are effective’ studies go.
georgeplusplus 6y ago
>> Masks did not become obligatory elsewhere I have to challenge this assessment from the article. Masks did become mandatory elsewhere. Mostly in targeted spots in the cities such as the zeil in Frankfurt and Potsdamer platz in Berlin and I can tell you that it is met with strict enforcement and that people are adhering to the rule ardently with very few exceptions. The article and much of the science leaves much to be desired. It is my opinion that the “all or nothing” pro mask people are actually obstructing the science. Their intolerance to confront or question evidence that is contradictory or unexplained anomalies in the data such as this article is dangerous to actually having the right response to covid leads to nonsensical draconian rules like the California mayor suggesting requiring wearing a mask 24 hours a day and only removing between bites when eating.

cm2187 6y ago

Seems pretty much a worthless analysis to me. Facemasks were introduced in April, infection went down in April, masks worked! Except that this virus seems highly seasonal and spring also came in April! Where are the "if it's not a double blind study where you isolate a variable, you haven't proven anything" people when we need them!

klmr 6y ago
> Except that this virus seems highly seasonal and spring also came in April! This effect is controlled for by the study, by comparing Jena to synthetic control groups.
La1n 6y ago
>Where are the "if it's not a double blind study where you isolate a variable, you haven't proven anything" people when we need them! Yes if only we had a second Earth.
- cm2187 6y ago
  Exactly the same argument against waiting 3 months for randomized studies to use a drug against an epidemic. If only one could press the pause button on the epidemic.

mfDjB 6y ago

I find it weird that science can't conclusively answer the question "is wearing a face mask going to significantly reduce the spread of covid". It's been nearly a year since this was a known disease, and beyond that masks have been around for a long time and they are used by the medical community to some degree. How can we not know based on the shear mechanics of these two entities whether this is effective? I feel like every other day there is a new study or report that refutes the study or the report I just saw from another respected institution. I'm not surprised people are frustrated at this problem. As an example, look at this study that was posted just 13 days ago on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159583

raverbashing 6y ago
You're right, it should be better. The Danish study is not good. They're not controlling for mask/no mask, they're controlling for suggestion to use masks (and they didn't even go back and ask "did you wear a mask or not). In the end it seems people are more worried in publishing hastly prepared experiments/results than worrying about getting to the bottom of things. > How can we not know based on the shear mechanics of these two entities whether this is effective? It seems obvious to me that masks have a positive effect. A mechanical barrier is better than nothing. "Oh but influenza" Influenza and Coronaviruses are different Doctors and Dentists don't use masks because they think it's funny or comfortable
- ghthor 6y ago
  Doctors and dentists use masks because they dont want spit ending up in there patients.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    It goes both ways, due to the sublingual glands. Especially when tongue depression or other procedures might trigger a release of saliva, or make the saliva in the mouth spread. Or cough. Or sneezes. If you were a doctor, would you be happy seeing a patient with a weird cough without masks/eye protection?

temptemptemp111 6y ago

They increase bacterial infections you sheep.

smokey_circles 6y ago

Masks are a pointless waste of time when it comes to containing the pandemic. Yes yes, I know. Just let me explain. Masks DO help prevent the range particles can travel when you breathe. I'm not arguing that. The fact is, however, they're useless in comparison to the ACTUAL champions of prevention. And that would largely be hygiene. I'm willing to bet 99% of you reading this do not clean your fingernails properly while washing your hands. Which is fine, THAT'S how good soap is. Doing it poorly is orders of magnitude better than not doing it all. Is the same true of masks? Absolutely not. If you don't wear a mask properly, it's useless. It gets worse with specialised gear, like the N95s. You need to be trained on how to fit, test and adjust that. Have a beard? Not gonna work. Small leak out the top? Nope, it's buggered. You ever notice how developing nations struggle with higher infant mortality rates, caused by preventable communicative diseases like cholera? It's because they don't wash their hands with soap. Soap is literally a life saver [0]. There's a damned good chance it's saved you a nasty infection, if not your life, directly or otherwise. It's strange to me we understand why gloves aren't effective, but somehow that logic gets lost when masks pop up. If you don't know how to stop yourself from contaminating your environment, you're really not getting anything from wearing a mask. Or gloves. Or scrubs. China is a fantastic example of this. They just ignored the whole "human rights" problem and went straight to welding people into their own homes [1]. Highly effective. Conversely, they'd been wearing masks for a long time because of their air pollution. Clearly not very effective. (The point here is the behavior and the objective is more important than the mask). Here's what we should be focusing our energy on: 1. Social Distancing 2. Wash your hands properly [2] 3. Coughing etiquette 4. And then, finally, PPE including masks. If you don't know how to use gloves properly, then don't waste your money (because we all seem to forget economics is also a problem to solve here). JUST focusing on masks won't cut it. Rather focus on JUST washing your hands then. You will see a much larger return on investment there. That evidence is also irrefutable. Compare the rate of death from communicable diseases in areas where washing with soap is prevalent to areas where it is not. SARS-CoV-2 has a lipid bi-layer, so soap will destroy it. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587156/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587156/ [1]: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLIFT9xoWSQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLIFT9xoWSQ the key bit here is scrape your nails against your hands when they're full of soap, so that the soap gets UNDER your nails too. Germs are tiny, and everywhere. So get em good