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

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.