7 ms·

The open letter for face masks is a great example for why this kind of thing is dubious. All prior high-quality evidence disputed the claim: https://www.cidra

by irq11 6y ago

The open letter for face masks is a great example for why this kind of thing is dubious. All prior high-quality evidence disputed the claim: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/special-ep-masks https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia... The subsequent evidence of real-world effectiveness isn’t great: cases are skyrocketing around the northern hemisphere, and mask mandates aren’t making a difference. The only randomized controlled trial ever conducted for masks and covid was not able to detect any protective effect, yet was rejected from multiple journals because of “consensus”: https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/vinay-prasad/89778 https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/vinay-prasad/89778 Science by signature count isn’t science; it’s a popularity contest. It’s perfectly fine to advocate for a belief, but nobody should pretend that they have the “scientific” argument simply because their signature list is longer.

jiofih 6y ago
> cases are skyrocketing And comments like yours are one of the reasons. The study shows that masks do little to protect the wearer - which is kind of obvious as it’s not going to filter incoming air very efficiently, that has never been the purpose of surgical masks. They don’t protect against airborne pathogens and every medical professional knows it. You need a crítica mass for masks to start reducing transmission rates. Mask use is nowhere near what it should have been, so you cannot take any conclusions out of that.
- irq11 6y ago
  > Mask use is nowhere near what it should have been All available evidence shows that you’re wrong. Self-reported mask usage rates are over 90%, nationwide. Moreover, many of the places with the highest compliance rates (e.g. Los Angeles) have the fastest-growing case counts: https://delphi.cmu.edu/covidcast/?date=20201018&signalType=value&mode=overview&sensor=fb-survey-smoothed_wearing_mask&level=state https://delphi.cmu.edu/covidcast/?date=20201018&signalType=v... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/23/pandemic-data-chart-masks/%3foutputType=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e4.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e4.htm
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Because population density and culture are the other factors. In most cases, combined with limiting large groups and reducing the frequency of meetings, it is doing what it is intended to do - reduce the R0 factor. Even in LA. Every Internet pundit who can take one number and divide by another, announces they have proven something or other. Give it a rest.
    - irq11 6y ago
      There’s always an excuse, but there’s never any data backing your claims. Provide even a single shred of evidence that masks affect the R0 of the virus in the real world. Modeling studies and correlations observed in April don’t count: most of the papers published this year looked at areas where case counts subsequently skyrocketed in the fall. My personal favorite is the mask study from Jena, Germany in the spring, which only made it into a journal right as cases were reaching an all-time high in the same area: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117 https://gesundheit.jena.de/en/coronavirus https://gesundheit.jena.de/en/coronavirus
      - jiofih 6y ago
        From the first link you mention: > we conclude that 20 d after becoming mandatory face masks have reduced the number of new infections by around 45% A later increase in infections does not invalidate statistical significance for earlier studies. It’s just math, not “an excuse”. You’ll never see the data for how many cases would have been recorded without the measures in place. You can see the full paper here: http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf The second link you posted earlier also says conclusively that higher reported mask usage correlated with lower reports of symptoms. Are you even reading your own sources? Or maybe you just have very skewed expectations of the impact? The Jena study estimates a 0.23 reduction in R rate. It is nowhere close to eliminating the disease, but this small reduction in transmission rate has an outsized effect on the total number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and that is what really matters (roughly, a 50% increase in transmission would result in 10x more deaths). The inconvenience of wearing a mask is an insignificant price to pay even if the numbers are off by an order of magnitude.
- masonic 6y ago
  Can you point me to any data showing that random quality cloth masks even reduce coronavirus transmission? The recent Kaiser San Jose case[0] where one worker infected 44+ fellow staff, all of whom were wearing masks, ... from inside a tree costume would seem to be a great counterexample. [0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/07/kaiser-san-jose-fined-43000-as-investigation-into-christmas-costume-covid-outbreak-continues/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/07/kaiser-san-jose-fined... Essentially everyone I see in the wild has been wearing masks for months, with almost perfect compliance since the Fall surge, including myself. But it seems to be mostly theater. It's like stopping BBs with a volleyball net. It also ignores the fact that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nose or a closed mouth. If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19 might have waned into a quiet death even without a vaccine, like SARS and MERS before it.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19 This...was stressed, significantly. Do you not remember that?
    - masonic 6y ago
      Look at any 20 articles about Covid transmission from February to April. You'd be lucky to find one that stressed not touching surfaces over mask wearing. In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks... and only 8 even mentioned surfaces as a transmission vector (generally, only doorhandles).
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        > In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks... That's because surfaces aren't a major transmission vector. There was significant early concern about surface transmission, with recommendations to leave packages to quarantine for a period or wipe things with alcohol to sanitize them. There was a period where I'd wipe my phone and credit cards with alcohol everytime I reentered my house. Pretty quickly though, the data showed that didn't matter, and so people (reasonably) stopped caring as much, instead prioritizing airborne particle transmission, which remains the main transmission vector.
AshWolfy 6y ago
Science is built on consensus Also the fact that mask mandates are poorly enforced, or that masks arent a replacement for other forms of prevention, or that some materials dont offer the same level of prevention dont change the fact that masks work
- irq11 6y ago
  It is not. Science is “built on” evidence. I am a professional scientist. Nobody has ever given me a pass on publication simply because they want to believe me. That said, science is a human institution, and all humans have cognitive biases that can be exploited - particularly in large groups.
  - esyir 6y ago
    That's a terribly optimistic view of science, speaking as someone who was also in the same boat. They might not just accept anything, but it'll be much easier if they want to believe you. This goes quintuple for social science.
    - irq11 6y ago
      Yes, we agree on that. Which is, again, why we don’t do “science“ by length of signature list.
- disown 6y ago
  > Science is built on consensus No it's not. It's built on hypothesis and experiments (empiricism). Just because the nazi party banned "jewish" physics doesn't mean that "jewish" science wasn't science. You think science is a democracy? If 51% of scientists say the earth is flat, then it's flat? You think each nation has their own version of science built on consense of their own scientists?
- iwlwifi-8265 6y ago
  > Science is built on consensus That's definitely the messaging public representatives use when communicating science issues to the general public. It's very effective at getting compliance across a society where our instinct is to look to our peers to figure out how to behave. As others have said, what has made science effective at being a vehicle of growth and change is that it is empirical / evidence based. New ideas slowly diffuse and get accepted as evidence grows for their support (which can take a long while). Decision making by evidence is also pretty much the opposite of natural human group behavior. I recommend reading/listening to some of the newer research on human psychology of groups. It pretty concretely shows that people consistently choose group harmony + stability over converging on the truth / correctness. Basically in a group we value getting along with each other a lot more (being in agreement / having consensus) than we value knowing what really is happening. Also, scientists being humans are not immune to this behavior either which is why evidence based progress is slow and can be resisted by established groups for lengthy periods.
irjustin 6y ago
I don't understand your hard-lined conclusion when the paper that the blog post references can't reach a conclusion either. The blog post also reaches a semi-hard lined conclusion yet still leaves room for additional work as it should. Problems with the study: - Not everyone the participants are interacting with also have a mask (Blog post references this with "protects you, not me") - The result is "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection." - "The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use." My point is "Masks are in effective" can't be concluded from this. It failed to show a reduction of 50%, sure, but what about 25% at a higher CI? Was it literally 0% at 5 sigma? Clearly more work needs to be done to show 0% at any meaningful CI. If you don't believe in masks fine, don't go see other people - it's way more effective anyway.
- irq11 6y ago
  You’re right, the Danish mask study showed that masks are consistent with every outcome ranging from an increase in infection to a reduction. You spins the wheel, you takes your chances, I guess...
gHosts 6y ago
https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7 https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7
pmiller2 6y ago
There's a difference between "mask mandates aren't making a difference" and "masks aren't effective." Take a look at Japan, where the government has done fuck all to deal with the virus, but people wear their masks.
- irq11 6y ago
  > Take a look at Japan OK: ” A record 7,841 new coronavirus cases were reported in Japan as of 8 p.m. on Friday. The nationwide daily tally has set a record for a fourth day in a row.” https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20210108_40/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20210108_40/ That’s some fantastic evidence that masks don’t work.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Le sigh. Just because infections are increasing does not mean masks don't work. Tell me, what would the numbers be without masks?

by irq11 6y ago

jiofih 6y ago

> cases are skyrocketing And comments like yours are one of the reasons. The study shows that masks do little to protect the wearer - which is kind of obvious as it’s not going to filter incoming air very efficiently, that has never been the purpose of surgical masks. They don’t protect against airborne pathogens and every medical professional knows it. You need a crítica mass for masks to start reducing transmission rates. Mask use is nowhere near what it should have been, so you cannot take any conclusions out of that.

irq11 6y ago
> Mask use is nowhere near what it should have been All available evidence shows that you’re wrong. Self-reported mask usage rates are over 90%, nationwide. Moreover, many of the places with the highest compliance rates (e.g. Los Angeles) have the fastest-growing case counts: https://delphi.cmu.edu/covidcast/?date=20201018&signalType=value&mode=overview&sensor=fb-survey-smoothed_wearing_mask&level=state https://delphi.cmu.edu/covidcast/?date=20201018&signalType=v... https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/23/pandemic-data-chart-masks/%3foutputType=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/business... https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e4.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6943e4.htm
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Because population density and culture are the other factors. In most cases, combined with limiting large groups and reducing the frequency of meetings, it is doing what it is intended to do - reduce the R0 factor. Even in LA. Every Internet pundit who can take one number and divide by another, announces they have proven something or other. Give it a rest.
  - irq11 6y ago
    There’s always an excuse, but there’s never any data backing your claims. Provide even a single shred of evidence that masks affect the R0 of the virus in the real world. Modeling studies and correlations observed in April don’t count: most of the papers published this year looked at areas where case counts subsequently skyrocketed in the fall. My personal favorite is the mask study from Jena, Germany in the spring, which only made it into a journal right as cases were reaching an all-time high in the same area: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117 https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/02/2015954117 https://gesundheit.jena.de/en/coronavirus https://gesundheit.jena.de/en/coronavirus
    - jiofih 6y ago
      From the first link you mention: > we conclude that 20 d after becoming mandatory face masks have reduced the number of new infections by around 45% A later increase in infections does not invalidate statistical significance for earlier studies. It’s just math, not “an excuse”. You’ll never see the data for how many cases would have been recorded without the measures in place. You can see the full paper here: http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp13319.pdf The second link you posted earlier also says conclusively that higher reported mask usage correlated with lower reports of symptoms. Are you even reading your own sources? Or maybe you just have very skewed expectations of the impact? The Jena study estimates a 0.23 reduction in R rate. It is nowhere close to eliminating the disease, but this small reduction in transmission rate has an outsized effect on the total number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, and that is what really matters (roughly, a 50% increase in transmission would result in 10x more deaths). The inconvenience of wearing a mask is an insignificant price to pay even if the numbers are off by an order of magnitude.
masonic 6y ago
Can you point me to any data showing that random quality cloth masks even reduce coronavirus transmission? The recent Kaiser San Jose case[0] where one worker infected 44+ fellow staff, all of whom were wearing masks, ... from inside a tree costume would seem to be a great counterexample. [0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/07/kaiser-san-jose-fined-43000-as-investigation-into-christmas-costume-covid-outbreak-continues/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/07/kaiser-san-jose-fined... Essentially everyone I see in the wild has been wearing masks for months, with almost perfect compliance since the Fall surge, including myself. But it seems to be mostly theater. It's like stopping BBs with a volleyball net. It also ignores the fact that the eyes are a bigger attack surface than the nose or a closed mouth. If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19 might have waned into a quiet death even without a vaccine, like SARS and MERS before it.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > If we had stressed the importance of not touching one's face combined with aggressive sanitization of hands, faces, and surfaces, Covid-19 This...was stressed, significantly. Do you not remember that?
  - masonic 6y ago
    Look at any 20 articles about Covid transmission from February to April. You'd be lucky to find one that stressed not touching surfaces over mask wearing. In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks... and only 8 even mentioned surfaces as a transmission vector (generally, only doorhandles).
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      > In 37 California articles I saved from that period, exactly zero even mentioned not touching surfaces in equal or higher importance to wearing masks... That's because surfaces aren't a major transmission vector. There was significant early concern about surface transmission, with recommendations to leave packages to quarantine for a period or wipe things with alcohol to sanitize them. There was a period where I'd wipe my phone and credit cards with alcohol everytime I reentered my house. Pretty quickly though, the data showed that didn't matter, and so people (reasonably) stopped caring as much, instead prioritizing airborne particle transmission, which remains the main transmission vector.

AshWolfy 6y ago

Science is built on consensus Also the fact that mask mandates are poorly enforced, or that masks arent a replacement for other forms of prevention, or that some materials dont offer the same level of prevention dont change the fact that masks work

irq11 6y ago
It is not. Science is “built on” evidence. I am a professional scientist. Nobody has ever given me a pass on publication simply because they want to believe me. That said, science is a human institution, and all humans have cognitive biases that can be exploited - particularly in large groups.
- esyir 6y ago
  That's a terribly optimistic view of science, speaking as someone who was also in the same boat. They might not just accept anything, but it'll be much easier if they want to believe you. This goes quintuple for social science.
  - irq11 6y ago
    Yes, we agree on that. Which is, again, why we don’t do “science“ by length of signature list.
disown 6y ago
> Science is built on consensus No it's not. It's built on hypothesis and experiments (empiricism). Just because the nazi party banned "jewish" physics doesn't mean that "jewish" science wasn't science. You think science is a democracy? If 51% of scientists say the earth is flat, then it's flat? You think each nation has their own version of science built on consense of their own scientists?
iwlwifi-8265 6y ago
> Science is built on consensus That's definitely the messaging public representatives use when communicating science issues to the general public. It's very effective at getting compliance across a society where our instinct is to look to our peers to figure out how to behave. As others have said, what has made science effective at being a vehicle of growth and change is that it is empirical / evidence based. New ideas slowly diffuse and get accepted as evidence grows for their support (which can take a long while). Decision making by evidence is also pretty much the opposite of natural human group behavior. I recommend reading/listening to some of the newer research on human psychology of groups. It pretty concretely shows that people consistently choose group harmony + stability over converging on the truth / correctness. Basically in a group we value getting along with each other a lot more (being in agreement / having consensus) than we value knowing what really is happening. Also, scientists being humans are not immune to this behavior either which is why evidence based progress is slow and can be resisted by established groups for lengthy periods.

irjustin 6y ago

I don't understand your hard-lined conclusion when the paper that the blog post references can't reach a conclusion either. The blog post also reaches a semi-hard lined conclusion yet still leaves room for additional work as it should. Problems with the study: - Not everyone the participants are interacting with also have a mask (Blog post references this with "protects you, not me") - The result is "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection." - "The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use." My point is "Masks are in effective" can't be concluded from this. It failed to show a reduction of 50%, sure, but what about 25% at a higher CI? Was it literally 0% at 5 sigma? Clearly more work needs to be done to show 0% at any meaningful CI. If you don't believe in masks fine, don't go see other people - it's way more effective anyway.

irq11 6y ago
You’re right, the Danish mask study showed that masks are consistent with every outcome ranging from an increase in infection to a reduction. You spins the wheel, you takes your chances, I guess...

gHosts 6y ago

https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7 https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7

pmiller2 6y ago

There's a difference between "mask mandates aren't making a difference" and "masks aren't effective." Take a look at Japan, where the government has done fuck all to deal with the virus, but people wear their masks.

irq11 6y ago
> Take a look at Japan OK: ” A record 7,841 new coronavirus cases were reported in Japan as of 8 p.m. on Friday. The nationwide daily tally has set a record for a fourth day in a row.” https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20210108_40/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20210108_40/ That’s some fantastic evidence that masks don’t work.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Le sigh. Just because infections are increasing does not mean masks don't work. Tell me, what would the numbers be without masks?