2 ms·
The difference in the cloth arm wasn't even close to statistically significant (p=0.540). It was noise.
by timr 5y ago
The difference in the cloth arm wasn't even close to statistically significant (p=0.540). It was noise.
- mike00632 5y agoYes, and as I wrote in another comment, that is completely different from concluding that cloth masks don't work. You're drawing a conclusion that the data doesn't support.
- timr 5y ago> You're drawing a conclusion that the data doesn't support. I'm telling you the conclusions of the paper. Your faith in masks is an entirely separate question that is clearly unaffected by the data here, because it requires proving a negative. Is it possible that cloth masks actually work, and this huge study failed to find any significant effect? Anything is possible, but the results here are indistinguishable from noise, and don't support the claim. And with every RCT that gets published showing negligible effect from community masking, the probability that the claim is true gets smaller.