8 ms·

Thanks for the reply. Cloth masks are spit shields, nothing more. As spit shields, there's good evidence for their effectiveness. I've seen no convincing evi

Thanks for the reply. Cloth masks are spit shields, nothing more. As spit shields, there's good evidence for their effectiveness. I've seen no convincing evidence that they're good for anything else. > they've become a totem for cargo-culting all sorts of inane rituals and behaviors I was just in the hospital for a week for an unrelated illness. Every person I encountered there said they had been vaccinated, yet they still insisted on masking everyone, even when it made communication difficult. I'm a little terrified that this madness won't ever end-- that the bureaucratic fervor for masks, distancing, and various degrees of lockdowns will emerge again in response to bad flu seasons, for example.

clairity 6y ago
i can actually see hospitals being a place where masks have more legitimacy, not specifically for corona, but for the confluence of many transmissible ailments accumulating there. but with corona, while it's not undeniably confirmed yet, it's quite likely that vaccines dramatically shorten the window of infectiousness, allowing most of the vaccinated to stop wearing masks after a short window (~couple days, iirc). yet, the general recommendation remains that they be worn by the vaccinated public indefinitely. the cdc apparently is now literally doubling-down by recommending two masks be worn by everyone, completely ignoring the human social dynamics that overwhelm the assumed threat model implicit with masks. if masks--or lockdowns for that matter--were dramatically effective, we'd see it in all the data we've fervently collected and analyzed over the past year. at best, we've found weak correlations all around (i.e., marginal effects), that suffer from unspecificity, because it's hard to unambiguously isolate independent variables from confounding ones in real world epidemiological data.

clairity 6y ago

i can actually see hospitals being a place where masks have more legitimacy, not specifically for corona, but for the confluence of many transmissible ailments accumulating there. but with corona, while it's not undeniably confirmed yet, it's quite likely that vaccines dramatically shorten the window of infectiousness, allowing most of the vaccinated to stop wearing masks after a short window (~couple days, iirc). yet, the general recommendation remains that they be worn by the vaccinated public indefinitely. the cdc apparently is now literally doubling-down by recommending two masks be worn by everyone, completely ignoring the human social dynamics that overwhelm the assumed threat model implicit with masks. if masks--or lockdowns for that matter--were dramatically effective, we'd see it in all the data we've fervently collected and analyzed over the past year. at best, we've found weak correlations all around (i.e., marginal effects), that suffer from unspecificity, because it's hard to unambiguously isolate independent variables from confounding ones in real world epidemiological data.