19 ms·

I think the masks issue was a bit different. In the past, medicine was practiced without adhering to the scientific method. This is luckily no longer the case.

by nextos 5y ago

I think the masks issue was a bit different. In the past, medicine was practiced without adhering to the scientific method. This is luckily no longer the case. However, medicine has not fully embraced the scientific method but some strange "evidence-based" variant. During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision. We always need to reason under uncertainty. The correct interpretation of the scientific method would have led to the conclusion that COVID was likely to be transmitted via aerosols (e.g. due to sequence similarity with other coronaviruses, which are known to be transmitted via aerosols) and imposing mandatory masks (because this is a very innocuous intervention).

timr 5y ago
The masks issue is different because we have very little actual evidence that masks in the hands of the general public have a substantial effect. The best evidence out there suggests a small impact (~11%) for surgical masks in an unvaccinated population, and none for cloth masks [1] The evidence quality is roughly as poor as that for ivermectin, vitamin D, etc., except that it has become a wildly political issue, fraught with propaganda to the point that most people will vehemently insist that the evidence quality is higher than it is. It is therefore deeply ironic that Slate is arguing about risk compensation, while using NPIs as an example of the kind of safety behavior being deterred by discussions of risk compensation. Did any of those NPIs do anything at all? We never did proper randomized studies, so we really have no idea. This feels like so much more propaganda: one side said that risk compensation is a thing, so now we must attack the notion, to ensure that $MY_PREFERRED_INTERVENTION is properly imposed on society. But nobody much cares if the intervention works... [1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk-of-covid19-by https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  The masks are secondary to the issue of refusing to acknowledge the high probability of airborne transmission. People were washing their hands, using hand sanitizer, opening doors with crazy key-chains, basically not touching anything, wearing gloves, fist and elbow bumping ... when they really needed to not be breathing each others air.
  - timr 5y ago
    Yeah, that was definitely part of it too. It was plausible for a minute there that surface transmission was real, but then it took way too long for the CDC and the WHO to admit it. So now, even today, I see people wearing dirty rubber gloves in the grocery store (sigh). There's simply no part of this pandemic that makes "the experts" look good, and it has utterly destroyed any remaining faith that I had in journalism. Now we merely have competing ideological factions, and their preferred sources of propaganda.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      Yeah, it's totally the fault of the CDC that people continue to do things that don't make sense. Totally a top down problem, all they had to do was get the messaging right and no one would have done anything wildly incoherent for the entire pandemic.
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        No one is asserting that the CDC/Health Canada mis-steps are the lone cause of the disastrous response to COVID.
        maxerickson 5y ago
        So now, even today, I see people wearing dirty rubber gloves in the grocery store (sigh). That sentence is about CDC messaging. There would be people wearing dirty rubber gloves in grocery stores if they did it perfect.
        Ensorceled 5y ago
        Again, NO ONE is asserting that the CDC messaging is causing all the problems. But it was, and id, certainly contributing to it.
        timr 5y ago
        If the CDC and the WHO and "the experts" hadn't spent months flooding the airwaves with the message that people should be scared of fomites, while ignoring aerosols? I think that might have played a role, yes.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Vinay does a big disservice to that 53% number and is in my opinion, extraordinarily dishonest about the 10% number. He says; > Interestingly, in the only published cluster RCT to date during COVID19, surgical masks had an 11% risk reduction and cloth masks had no effect at all on the primary endpoint of symptom driven lab positive result The actual study showed that with intervention, the scientists increased the rate of mask wearing from 13% to 42% -- and that 29/100 person uptake was enough to reduce Covid seropresence by 11% in the community. That's a huge effect! Fewer than half of the people in the villages were wearing masks and symptomatic Covid saw >10% reduction compared to villages without extra mask wearing. It's abundantly clear that the effect would be far greater with universal masking so to say "mask wearing only leads to a 10% reduction" omits a massive part of the story. https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati... To quote the authors who tried in vain to prevent people like Vinay from mangling their research: > Our results should not be taken to imply that masks can prevent only 10% of COVID-19 cases, let alone 10% of COVID-19 mortality. Our intervention induced 29 more people out of every 100 to wear masks, with 42% of people wearing masks in total. The total impact with near universal masking–perhaps achievable with alternative strategies or stricter enforcement–may be several times larger than our 10% estimate. Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used, and even more for the highest-risk individuals in our sample (23% for ages 50-60 and 35% for ages 60+). These numbers likely give a better sense of the impact of our intervention on severe morbidity and mortality, since most of the disease burden is borne by the elderly. Where achievable, universal mask adoption is likely to have still larger impacts.
  - timr 5y ago
    > The actual study showed that with intervention, the scientists increased the rate of mask wearing from 13% to 42% -- and that 29/100 person uptake was enough to reduce Covid seropresence by 11% in the community. That's a huge effect! No, it isn't. Because he's being generous: the 11% difference was on a baseline seroprevalence of 0.76%. So you have a study where cloth masks were shown to be completely ineffective, and the total absolute effect size of the surgical mask arm was .08% (edit: 0.09% per the numbers in the paper). In other words: you'd have to get 1300 people to wear masks to prevent one seropositive (in case you're wondering, the confidence interval on that value overlaps zero.) No matter how you spin it, this is a small, small effect. And this is in a completely unvaccinated population -- the best possible scenario for masks. Even if we accept the argument that "several times more" people would be protected if we lived in a fictional, ideal universe where everyone wore surgical masks (newsflash: we don't), we're still only talking about a total effect size of a fraction of a percent. Oh and by the way, it's particularly hilarious that the paragraph you quoted says the following: > Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used That has to go in my top-five lifetime examples of weasel-wording for reframing negative experimental outcomes. Cloth masks showed no effect. Saying that surgical masks reduced prevalence "more" is like saying that together, Ootani Shohei and I hit 46 home runs last year. But yeah, he hit more.
- dendriti 5y ago
  if you are getting your medical information from a substack page, I don't think anything anyone here will convince you otherwise... pointing out elsewhere in the thread that when the CDC fucked up, they ultimately admitted it and changed recommendations, does not support your argument.
  - timr 5y ago
    The "substack page" is written by a doctor and professor at UCSF who specializes in clinical trials, evidence-based medicine and medical reversals.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      If this pandemic has proven anything at all, it's that incompetent and/or corrupt doctors are a dime a dozen. Pick any intervention, no matter how counterproductive, implausible, or just plain stupid, and you can probably find a fully-accredited MD somewhere who's evangelizing it from the rooftops. Medical doctors are not scientists, or even engineers. They are more like highly-skilled technicians. NTTAWWT, but the MD degree by itself shouldn't bring individual doctors anywhere as much social and scientific credibility as it does. For most Americans, the best source of information on COVID has been, and remains, their public health authorities.
      - zpeti 5y ago
        > If this pandemic has proven anything at all, it's that incompetent and/or corrupt doctors are a dime a dozen. Not sure which side of the argument you are on, but it's funny, did you see how the death count for vaccinated people on the 22,000 pfizer study has been corrected from 17 to 24 people? And the FDA has asked for 76 years to ongoingly release the safety data on the vaccine? I'm vaccinated, but I'm super angry and worried about wtf is going on here. What's certain is, yes: If this pandemic has proven anything, it's that there are incompetent and corrupt people EVERYWHERE on ALL SIDES.
        CamperBob2 5y ago
- neilwilson 5y ago
  On a fundamental level the recommendation is the wrong way around as a matter of basic physics. Filters work better under suction than pressure - because they are less likely to leak. So why have a nonsensical system where everybody has to wear a mask properly all the time and change it regularly in the correct manner just to have any material effect, when an individual that is worried could just wear a better one that filters inbound properly and everybody gets to do what they want. What's interesting about this is the psychology of why intelligent people have swallowed this. Do they believe the mask is filtering inbound when it isn't? Or is it entirely political - signalling membership of a group to others. Or is it that the perennially worried believe they should have the right to tell others what they can and can't do, when there is a perfectly reasonably 'live and let live' option available. Why choose a position that divides society when there is one that brings people together?
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    I've always heard it as masks being more to protect others during the time where you're infectious but largely asymptomatic. At any rate, you can't prove you're uninfected easily - but masks are trivial to validate.
    - neilwilson 5y ago
      Why do you need to 'protect others' if their mask works inbound? You have no idea whether you are 'protecting others' or just creating plastic waste for no good reason. Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect whatsoever in the real world. No deflection in rates can be seen from NPIs and the process leaks like crazy. It's entirely a backward belief. Believing you are 'protecting others', yet doing nothing to protect yourself against the almost certain risk that other people won't be 'protecting others'. None of it makes any sense in any logical analysis.
      - FeepingCreature 5y ago
        > Why do you need to 'protect others' if their mask works inbound? Huh? You need to protect others because masks (mostly) don't work inbound, that's what I'm saying. (But do work outbound.) > Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect Sorry, restate: the presence of masks is trivial to validate.
- clairity 5y ago
  it's dismaying to see a reasoned (if countervailing) position being so reflexively suppressed, and maddening to witness the mass hysteria still buttressing ineffective mandated interventions like public masking. the only places outside of healthcare settings where masking plausibly makes any difference for ordinary folks is at home (amongst friends/family) and in crowded indoor social gatherings (club, house party, etc.). a modicum of physical distancing is all that's need in most public places to minimize tranmission risk about as much as is possible. combine that with masking public-facing workers (like cashiers), and we've maxed out the potential of masking as an intervention. everything else is theater.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  11% (just adopting the number from your comment, no idea if that is the real figure) is huge. It would turn a spread 1.05 into one of 0.94 assuming that number has a direct impact like that. That's the difference between 'out of control' and 'decreasing to the point where we can start doing contact tracing'. That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask: so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one. As for the rest of your comment, the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that, so low that it drowns in the noise and is essentially a complete wash, and there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity.
  - timr 5y ago
    > 11% (just adopting the number from your comment, no idea if that is the real figure) is huge. It would turn a spread 1.05 into one of 0.94 assuming that number has a direct impact like that. No, because that's not what the 11% number was measuring. You can't just take an 11% relative reduction in population seroprevalence at a given time, and then blindly multiply the virus R0 by that factor. They observed a drop in symptomatic seroprevalence that corresponded to about 1 case for for every 1300 people who wore a mask. That is nowhere near an 11% drop in R0 (which you'll recall is an exponent). > That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask: How do you know? Have you measured it? No, of course you haven't. You're just asserting things. > so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one. Fine. You should take Ivermectin, then. And vitamin D. And flush your sinuses daily with a neti pot. And get your chakra aligned. It's essentially the same argument. Can't hurt, might help! By your logic, it all must be done. ...or do you just pick-and-choose which unsupported interventions you prefer to believe in? (for the record: I do not believe you should take Ivermectin. But it is the same argument.) > the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that, It really isn't. Just like mask studies, there are a few weakly suggestive good ones, and a few bad ones that make ridiculous claims, and a whole lot of nonsense in between. > there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity. No, not really. It's a pretty common, safe drug. We probably know more about the downsides of Ivermectin than we do about the downsides of (say) masking young children in school.
- twic 5y ago
  Striking that the only reply in this thread which refers to actual data is the one which is downvoted. More than a political issue, for many, mask-wearing has taken on something like religious significance.
  - duckmysick 5y ago
    Does it? It's a link to a Substack article with some numbers, but no actual data. Not even the links or names of the papers and articles. At first I thought it was a stylistic choice, but the author does link his own whitepaper from the Cato institute. There's also a thought experiment, which is convenient, since the outcome is open to everyone's interpretation. But it's not actual data.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision. It was criminal. There was a ton of circumstantial evidence: SARS-CoV-1 was thought to spread via airborne droplets, the high rate of transmission, the types of transmission, medical staff infections, reduced rates of transmissions in countries where mask wearing while sick was common, ... we would have convicted COVID19 on less evidence. But no double blind experiments, so no proof. Go about your day citizens!
- Spooky23 5y ago
  There was definitely an anti-mask bias in the US at the policy level, because cloth mask use has limited effectiveness and triggers a pretty visceral reaction. A lot of the weird “muh freedom” and antivax nonsense was a pivot from anti-mask. COVID hit at the worst time, our federal government was reeling from the insanity of the last administration, and key early measures weren’t taken. A reaction similar to what happened in China in the NY Metro region and a few other places early on would have blunted this, and protocols had been developed and left on the shelf due to the political implications.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Fortunately there was never any possibility of welding NY Metro area residents into their apartment as a reaction to COVID, like what happened in China.
    - TakuYam 5y ago
      Only after CNY, the super-spread event that turned this global. What is especially galling is that for all his hardline rhetoric and complete lack of respect or fear for the rest of the world Xi is terrified of the reprisals at home if he banned CNY travel.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Are you referring to the insanity of the last New York administration that was responsible for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home... and measures including not putting infectious people into nursing homes? If not, what are you referring to and what key early measures do you think should have been taken?
svachalek 5y ago
Unfortunately those high ranking officials included the WHO, which was in denial for many months.
- phone8675309 5y ago
  I'm not sure they were in denial as much as not wanting to piss off China.
  - blago 5y ago
    I don't think China had any preference on whether the world was going to wear masks. Let's not vilify them too much. This has nothing to do with the origin of the virus which is the only topic that seems to make them touchy.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      It’s not exactly freakenomics to point out how many masks are made in China though.
      - blago 5y ago
        The GP was suggesting that China was somehow opposed to wearing masks.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        I think it's more that they were suggesting that an aggressive response to COVID19 would have appeared to be an anti-China move, and thus further jeopardize the US relationship with China.
        maxerickson 5y ago
        Pandering to China wasn't a particular priority of the US government at the time. Is the idea that mask policy would make up for all the politicians calling it "the China virus"?
lr4444lr 5y ago
But there's another point the article is making: if mask wearing leads to people ignoring distancing because of a false sense that the mask provides them with strong enough protection that they can relax that, if this is observable how people act in aggregate, then maybe it does make sense overall not to have a mandate as a public health matter.
- dboreham 5y ago
  To be fair, that was at the time one of the reasons given for downplaying mask wearing.
- zpeti 5y ago
  Anecdotally this is absolutely true. I know several people who wear masks while sitting in a car for long period of time with someone else. I know others who think going on jam packed public transport with a mask is basically safe. The least bad are the teachers who think when you spend an hour in a classroom with 30 people a mask will keep you safe. Aerosol transmission. It won't. In an hour the air will fill with the virus if someone is infected. The original virus apparently took 15 minutes to infect in a room. If delta is minimum 6x more infectious we are talking minutes. By increasing air circulation, or meeting outside, we can reduce infections much more than if 30 people are wearing a mask inside a room for an hour.
jltsiren 5y ago
We as a society don't want administrators adhere to the scientific method. We want them to be conservative. For some reason, people don't see the consequences of action and inaction symmetrically. If an administrator chooses a risky intervention and it turns out to be the wrong choice, we hold that person more liable than another administrator who chooses inaction with equally bad consequences. Because we give administrators power and hold them liable for their choices, we expect them to avoid risky interventions out of self-interest. Early in the pandemic, experts put too much weight on the risks of improper mask use. Perhaps because they were trained to use masks in risky situations where the consequences of improper use were real. It took them some time to realize that the general public would be using masks in low-risk situations, which reduced the expected risks significantly.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > For some reason, people don't see the consequences of action and inaction symmetrically. Prevention paradox. Regarding the masks, at least in Germany the problem was different... politicians knew that masks were effective but, since the stockpiles of the Cold War era had been dismantled and domestic production all but non-existent because no matter what China is going to be at least 10x cheaper, they feared a "bank run" on the few masks that were still in the country. Politicians didn't have the guts to come out and say "yes, we know that masks help, but please don't go on shopping sprees, we need every single mask there is for the hospitals".
  - masklinn 5y ago
    France also did that, except it was not cold-war era: after the 2006 bird flu scare, the country decided to set up a strategic reserve, which obviously required domestic production which would go towards stockpile upkeep so there would be companies ready in case of need. In 2009 as H1N1 started ramping up the reserve had half a billion masks (and 100 million already ordered), the health minister launched buildup order to increase the stockpile to 1.7 billion (a billion surgigals and 700m N95/FFP2). After H1N1 drew down, the health minister got greatly criticised for the expense, and following the event the agency got slowly starved out: the government decided to drop FFP2s entirely, and significantly draw down the stock of surgicals. In 2013 it moved the entire thing over to private entities (companies were supposed to stock up masks for employees, imagine how stupid that idea is). Obviously this completely killed the domestic production in short order as companies were not doing jack shit, and even if they had they’d have bought chinese production. As soon as 2015 all the companies set up after 2006 had folded, and domestic production capabilities were essentially gone. In 2016, the agency which had been specifically set up to oversee pandemic preparation and response to pandemics was killed, officially “folded” into a more general public health agency, after having been slowly starved of funds for years. When COVID-19 hit, the country had no production capabilities (500 million masks a year) and the stock was essentially nil (about 150 million masks, 3 weeks worth of healthcare demand alone).
throwoutway 5y ago
> medicine has not fully embraced the scientific method but some strange "evidence-based" variant. Why would you not want to follow a conservative, evidence-based variant of the scientific method? > During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision. And the current administration continues to employ this official and give them a microphone
- MrPatan 5y ago
  Because apparently they are too dumb to evaluate low risk-low cost interventions like wearing a mask in a different way from high risk-high cost interventions like taking a new drug.
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    What happens when different people perceive the cost of these measures differently though? That's half the problem here, with anti-maskers screaming that they can't breathe. You can try forcing them, like we're doing now, and they'll just take off their mask to cough and sneeze like half the passengers in my last flight + take every possible option to take it off + wear it off their nose to begin with.
dboreham 5y ago
> because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols My recollection was that it was much worse. They definitively and aggressively said that it was _not_ transmitted via aerosols.
- djdjjrjrjr 5y ago
  This echos my partner’s experience (the treat covid in an icu). This was almost a year un with some plausible evidence and several countries saying they thought aerosol transmission was likely. Yet the key agencies and experts here were aggressively saying aerosol transmission was very unlikely.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  The WHO disseminated the information that it was not transmissible at all. "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus"
  - sdflhasjd 5y ago
    Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. These two statements don't say the same thing, although people do interpret it that way.
    - bmn__ 5y ago
      That logic works on the assumption of science and cooperation that we are all telling each other the truth so that everyone may benefit. I posit that's not what happened, there was no absent evidence. The NHC knew full well that they had (another) SARS on their hands in January 2020, but lied to the WHO because they were directed by the party to suppress the findings for the usual reasons (don't rock the boat, save face on the global stage, keep the populace under control). The WHO took this false information and neglected to verify it before disseminating it, so they are complicit in the affair.
gpapilion 5y ago
I disagree. We knew masks would help, and medical professionals were using them. Basically I kept hearing only n95 I’d effective, or you’ll use them wrong. We know masks would help more with larger droplets, yet we persisted with the lie.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> And this was a catastrophic decision. To be fair, there was also a shortage of masks, so I don't think the consequences would be much better if they acted correctly. The worst result was reducing the confidence of the people in health authorities. We are still to pay the price for that.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  That played into their thinking, according to what officials like Fauci have said later in interviews. They didn't want to encourage people to just buy up scarce masks. But if you ask me this was extremely shortsighted because turning it into a controversial political football was the worst thing that could have happened.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Given what that qanonsense manages to turn the least controversial things into political football, and doesn't care for whether or not there are any facts backing their position, it wouldn't have mattered. Republicans would have just started complaining about it in March, instead of whichever later date the CDC changed their guidance. The first rule of politics is to never let a good crisis go to waste. The second rule of politics is to always piss on whatever your opponents are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      They had an opportunity to get everyone to act unanimously, avoiding that issue, and they squandered it.
    - jquery 5y ago
      Great point about Qanon and facts not being necessary. The fact we keep having the same argument on HN about masks is proof that it doesn’t really matter what Fauci did back then. It’s just weak justification for current bad behavior.
      - 5y ago
idontwantthis 5y ago
This was particularly maddening because, technically, they were right about it not being "airborne". By definition it wasn't "airborne". Unfortunately the definition of "airborne" was completely nonsensical. "Airborne" required the droplets to be below a certain size, when that clearly had nothing to do with whether or not it travelled long distances through the air. It took a lot of frustrating work by scientists who knew what the hell they were talking about to convince the high ranking officials to stop killing people.
emodendroket 5y ago
People try to convince me that "nobody could have known masks were effective for respiratory illness until the science came in" like the doctor's office didn't have surgical masks specifically for people with flu-like illness well before anybody had ever heard of COVID-19.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  I mean, logically speaking, if one person is telling you to wear a mask and another person is telling you not to, you should probably be wearing two.
- chrischattin 5y ago
  Masks have been heavily studied re viral transmission and been show to have zero effect. It’s like people are ignoring the giant body of prior scientific research. Masks aren’t a new idea in medicine.
  - andi999 5y ago
    Can you point to the publications which show the zero effect? Cursory scan found that there are effects: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01428.x?casa_token=-Q6bp-7NdA0AAAAA%3AgIp4OWTEbLn6wn4Ku9jYZNiDEUJ6VvpzI2rMjlxBcvDkHQ5_p8Lsb1X9_dhMiqsrNKq7kqCyef7Qeg https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6924...
    - chrischattin 5y ago
      Sure. Here’s a meta of 14 studies. But, there are hundreds saying the same thing… “In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25)” https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article Also note, what you posted is not a scientific study. It’s a made up model. Real world evidence is falling in line with previous scientific knowledge. Countries w/out mask mandates have no statistical difference in transmission, as expected. But, the whole thing has been politicized.
pantalaimon 5y ago
To me it seemed more like it was because there was not a great enough supply of masks, so to avoid having the general population buy them all up but to save them for medical workers, this message was communicated.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  Which is criminal in any way you look at it.
- DFHippie 5y ago
  I remember this being explicitly stated: please leave the masks for front line workers. In the US in the early days of the pandemic one item that kept reappearing in the news was the insufficiency of the PPE supply, including masks. The Trump administration was getting pounded on (outside of his friendly media) for the insufficiency of its efforts to remedy this. They were leaving it up to the states to duke it out among themselves. Supplies, including masks, were being horded and then resold at exorbitant prices. Jared was in the news for a shady deal relating to acquiring masks. There were news stories about people selling defective masks. I don't understand how this all seems to have dropped out of everyone's memory.
jvvw 5y ago
I assumed that we were not told to use masks here in the UK because there was a limited supply of them at the time and they didn't want that supply diverted from medical settings.
verisimi 5y ago
> In the past, medicine was practiced without adhering to the scientific method. This is luckily no longer the case. Cool story bro, but I disagree. If we were following the scientific method how to explain why 70% of studies cannot be reproduced? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Political_repercussions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Political_r... "A similar survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility showed that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments." Not to mention that basically all studies are paid for by one of only 3 (connected) sources - military, government or corporations. If you control the purse strings, you decide what to (or not to) study. Which explains all sorts of basic 'anomalies' - such as that we don't know what the best sort of diet is for us.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >Which explains all sorts of basic 'anomalies' - such as that we don't know what the best sort of diet is for us. It took way too long to figure out that absolute LDL cholesterol levels predict nothing and that only oxidized LDL (even at extremely small concentrations) is a predictor for heart disease.
  - virtuallynathan 5y ago
    I would say very few in the medical community would even agree to that
flerovium 5y ago
It is likely this was to stop people from buying masks in order to allow medical professionals to buy them. Deliberate misleading may be worse than a mistake, but it probably wasn't because of the scientific method.

by nextos 5y ago

timr 5y ago

The masks issue is different because we have very little actual evidence that masks in the hands of the general public have a substantial effect. The best evidence out there suggests a small impact (~11%) for surgical masks in an unvaccinated population, and none for cloth masks [1] The evidence quality is roughly as poor as that for ivermectin, vitamin D, etc., except that it has become a wildly political issue, fraught with propaganda to the point that most people will vehemently insist that the evidence quality is higher than it is. It is therefore deeply ironic that Slate is arguing about risk compensation, while using NPIs as an example of the kind of safety behavior being deterred by discussions of risk compensation. Did any of those NPIs do anything at all? We never did proper randomized studies, so we really have no idea. This feels like so much more propaganda: one side said that risk compensation is a thing, so now we must attack the notion, to ensure that $MY_PREFERRED_INTERVENTION is properly imposed on society. But nobody much cares if the intervention works... [1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk-of-covid19-by https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/do-masks-reduce-risk...

Ensorceled 5y ago
The masks are secondary to the issue of refusing to acknowledge the high probability of airborne transmission. People were washing their hands, using hand sanitizer, opening doors with crazy key-chains, basically not touching anything, wearing gloves, fist and elbow bumping ... when they really needed to not be breathing each others air.
- timr 5y ago
  Yeah, that was definitely part of it too. It was plausible for a minute there that surface transmission was real, but then it took way too long for the CDC and the WHO to admit it. So now, even today, I see people wearing dirty rubber gloves in the grocery store (sigh). There's simply no part of this pandemic that makes "the experts" look good, and it has utterly destroyed any remaining faith that I had in journalism. Now we merely have competing ideological factions, and their preferred sources of propaganda.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    Yeah, it's totally the fault of the CDC that people continue to do things that don't make sense. Totally a top down problem, all they had to do was get the messaging right and no one would have done anything wildly incoherent for the entire pandemic.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      No one is asserting that the CDC/Health Canada mis-steps are the lone cause of the disastrous response to COVID.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        So now, even today, I see people wearing dirty rubber gloves in the grocery store (sigh). That sentence is about CDC messaging. There would be people wearing dirty rubber gloves in grocery stores if they did it perfect.
        Ensorceled 5y ago
        Again, NO ONE is asserting that the CDC messaging is causing all the problems. But it was, and id, certainly contributing to it.
        timr 5y ago
        If the CDC and the WHO and "the experts" hadn't spent months flooding the airwaves with the message that people should be scared of fomites, while ignoring aerosols? I think that might have played a role, yes.
mikeyouse 5y ago
Vinay does a big disservice to that 53% number and is in my opinion, extraordinarily dishonest about the 10% number. He says; > Interestingly, in the only published cluster RCT to date during COVID19, surgical masks had an 11% risk reduction and cloth masks had no effect at all on the primary endpoint of symptom driven lab positive result The actual study showed that with intervention, the scientists increased the rate of mask wearing from 13% to 42% -- and that 29/100 person uptake was enough to reduce Covid seropresence by 11% in the community. That's a huge effect! Fewer than half of the people in the villages were wearing masks and symptomatic Covid saw >10% reduction compared to villages without extra mask wearing. It's abundantly clear that the effect would be far greater with universal masking so to say "mask wearing only leads to a 10% reduction" omits a massive part of the story. https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati... To quote the authors who tried in vain to prevent people like Vinay from mangling their research: > Our results should not be taken to imply that masks can prevent only 10% of COVID-19 cases, let alone 10% of COVID-19 mortality. Our intervention induced 29 more people out of every 100 to wear masks, with 42% of people wearing masks in total. The total impact with near universal masking–perhaps achievable with alternative strategies or stricter enforcement–may be several times larger than our 10% estimate. Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used, and even more for the highest-risk individuals in our sample (23% for ages 50-60 and 35% for ages 60+). These numbers likely give a better sense of the impact of our intervention on severe morbidity and mortality, since most of the disease burden is borne by the elderly. Where achievable, universal mask adoption is likely to have still larger impacts.
- timr 5y ago
  > The actual study showed that with intervention, the scientists increased the rate of mask wearing from 13% to 42% -- and that 29/100 person uptake was enough to reduce Covid seropresence by 11% in the community. That's a huge effect! No, it isn't. Because he's being generous: the 11% difference was on a baseline seroprevalence of 0.76%. So you have a study where cloth masks were shown to be completely ineffective, and the total absolute effect size of the surgical mask arm was .08% (edit: 0.09% per the numbers in the paper). In other words: you'd have to get 1300 people to wear masks to prevent one seropositive (in case you're wondering, the confidence interval on that value overlaps zero.) No matter how you spin it, this is a small, small effect. And this is in a completely unvaccinated population -- the best possible scenario for masks. Even if we accept the argument that "several times more" people would be protected if we lived in a fictional, ideal universe where everyone wore surgical masks (newsflash: we don't), we're still only talking about a total effect size of a fraction of a percent. Oh and by the way, it's particularly hilarious that the paragraph you quoted says the following: > Additionally, the intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence more when surgical masks were used That has to go in my top-five lifetime examples of weasel-wording for reframing negative experimental outcomes. Cloth masks showed no effect. Saying that surgical masks reduced prevalence "more" is like saying that together, Ootani Shohei and I hit 46 home runs last year. But yeah, he hit more.
dendriti 5y ago
if you are getting your medical information from a substack page, I don't think anything anyone here will convince you otherwise... pointing out elsewhere in the thread that when the CDC fucked up, they ultimately admitted it and changed recommendations, does not support your argument.
- timr 5y ago
  The "substack page" is written by a doctor and professor at UCSF who specializes in clinical trials, evidence-based medicine and medical reversals.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    If this pandemic has proven anything at all, it's that incompetent and/or corrupt doctors are a dime a dozen. Pick any intervention, no matter how counterproductive, implausible, or just plain stupid, and you can probably find a fully-accredited MD somewhere who's evangelizing it from the rooftops. Medical doctors are not scientists, or even engineers. They are more like highly-skilled technicians. NTTAWWT, but the MD degree by itself shouldn't bring individual doctors anywhere as much social and scientific credibility as it does. For most Americans, the best source of information on COVID has been, and remains, their public health authorities.
    - zpeti 5y ago
      > If this pandemic has proven anything at all, it's that incompetent and/or corrupt doctors are a dime a dozen. Not sure which side of the argument you are on, but it's funny, did you see how the death count for vaccinated people on the 22,000 pfizer study has been corrected from 17 to 24 people? And the FDA has asked for 76 years to ongoingly release the safety data on the vaccine? I'm vaccinated, but I'm super angry and worried about wtf is going on here. What's certain is, yes: If this pandemic has proven anything, it's that there are incompetent and corrupt people EVERYWHERE on ALL SIDES.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
neilwilson 5y ago
On a fundamental level the recommendation is the wrong way around as a matter of basic physics. Filters work better under suction than pressure - because they are less likely to leak. So why have a nonsensical system where everybody has to wear a mask properly all the time and change it regularly in the correct manner just to have any material effect, when an individual that is worried could just wear a better one that filters inbound properly and everybody gets to do what they want. What's interesting about this is the psychology of why intelligent people have swallowed this. Do they believe the mask is filtering inbound when it isn't? Or is it entirely political - signalling membership of a group to others. Or is it that the perennially worried believe they should have the right to tell others what they can and can't do, when there is a perfectly reasonably 'live and let live' option available. Why choose a position that divides society when there is one that brings people together?
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  I've always heard it as masks being more to protect others during the time where you're infectious but largely asymptomatic. At any rate, you can't prove you're uninfected easily - but masks are trivial to validate.
  - neilwilson 5y ago
    Why do you need to 'protect others' if their mask works inbound? You have no idea whether you are 'protecting others' or just creating plastic waste for no good reason. Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect whatsoever in the real world. No deflection in rates can be seen from NPIs and the process leaks like crazy. It's entirely a backward belief. Believing you are 'protecting others', yet doing nothing to protect yourself against the almost certain risk that other people won't be 'protecting others'. None of it makes any sense in any logical analysis.
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      > Why do you need to 'protect others' if their mask works inbound? Huh? You need to protect others because masks (mostly) don't work inbound, that's what I'm saying. (But do work outbound.) > Clearly masks are not trivial to validate given that there is no evidence they have any positive effect Sorry, restate: the presence of masks is trivial to validate.
clairity 5y ago
it's dismaying to see a reasoned (if countervailing) position being so reflexively suppressed, and maddening to witness the mass hysteria still buttressing ineffective mandated interventions like public masking. the only places outside of healthcare settings where masking plausibly makes any difference for ordinary folks is at home (amongst friends/family) and in crowded indoor social gatherings (club, house party, etc.). a modicum of physical distancing is all that's need in most public places to minimize tranmission risk about as much as is possible. combine that with masking public-facing workers (like cashiers), and we've maxed out the potential of masking as an intervention. everything else is theater.
jacquesm 5y ago
11% (just adopting the number from your comment, no idea if that is the real figure) is huge. It would turn a spread 1.05 into one of 0.94 assuming that number has a direct impact like that. That's the difference between 'out of control' and 'decreasing to the point where we can start doing contact tracing'. That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask: so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one. As for the rest of your comment, the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that, so low that it drowns in the noise and is essentially a complete wash, and there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity.
- timr 5y ago
  > 11% (just adopting the number from your comment, no idea if that is the real figure) is huge. It would turn a spread 1.05 into one of 0.94 assuming that number has a direct impact like that. No, because that's not what the 11% number was measuring. You can't just take an 11% relative reduction in population seroprevalence at a given time, and then blindly multiply the virus R0 by that factor. They observed a drop in symptomatic seroprevalence that corresponded to about 1 case for for every 1300 people who wore a mask. That is nowhere near an 11% drop in R0 (which you'll recall is an exponent). > That's exactly what is wrong with all these discussions, the cost of wearing a mask is negligible compared the potential cost of not wearing a mask: How do you know? Have you measured it? No, of course you haven't. You're just asserting things. > so wear a mask. It doesn't matter if it is proven to help yet or not, the fact that it may help and won't harm is the only thing that matters when deciding whether or not you should wear one. Fine. You should take Ivermectin, then. And vitamin D. And flush your sinuses daily with a neti pot. And get your chakra aligned. It's essentially the same argument. Can't hurt, might help! By your logic, it all must be done. ...or do you just pick-and-choose which unsupported interventions you prefer to believe in? (for the record: I do not believe you should take Ivermectin. But it is the same argument.) > the evidence quality for Ivermectin is substantially lower than that, It really isn't. Just like mask studies, there are a few weakly suggestive good ones, and a few bad ones that make ridiculous claims, and a whole lot of nonsense in between. > there are substantial downsides to using it in quantity. No, not really. It's a pretty common, safe drug. We probably know more about the downsides of Ivermectin than we do about the downsides of (say) masking young children in school.
twic 5y ago
Striking that the only reply in this thread which refers to actual data is the one which is downvoted. More than a political issue, for many, mask-wearing has taken on something like religious significance.
- duckmysick 5y ago
  Does it? It's a link to a Substack article with some numbers, but no actual data. Not even the links or names of the papers and articles. At first I thought it was a stylistic choice, but the author does link his own whitepaper from the Cato institute. There's also a thought experiment, which is convenient, since the outcome is open to everyone's interpretation. But it's not actual data.

Ensorceled 5y ago

> During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision. It was criminal. There was a ton of circumstantial evidence: SARS-CoV-1 was thought to spread via airborne droplets, the high rate of transmission, the types of transmission, medical staff infections, reduced rates of transmissions in countries where mask wearing while sick was common, ... we would have convicted COVID19 on less evidence. But no double blind experiments, so no proof. Go about your day citizens!

Spooky23 5y ago
There was definitely an anti-mask bias in the US at the policy level, because cloth mask use has limited effectiveness and triggers a pretty visceral reaction. A lot of the weird “muh freedom” and antivax nonsense was a pivot from anti-mask. COVID hit at the worst time, our federal government was reeling from the insanity of the last administration, and key early measures weren’t taken. A reaction similar to what happened in China in the NY Metro region and a few other places early on would have blunted this, and protocols had been developed and left on the shelf due to the political implications.
- nradov 5y ago
  Fortunately there was never any possibility of welding NY Metro area residents into their apartment as a reaction to COVID, like what happened in China.
  - TakuYam 5y ago
    Only after CNY, the super-spread event that turned this global. What is especially galling is that for all his hardline rhetoric and complete lack of respect or fear for the rest of the world Xi is terrified of the reprisals at home if he banned CNY travel.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Are you referring to the insanity of the last New York administration that was responsible for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home... and measures including not putting infectious people into nursing homes? If not, what are you referring to and what key early measures do you think should have been taken?

svachalek 5y ago

Unfortunately those high ranking officials included the WHO, which was in denial for many months.

phone8675309 5y ago
I'm not sure they were in denial as much as not wanting to piss off China.
- blago 5y ago
  I don't think China had any preference on whether the world was going to wear masks. Let's not vilify them too much. This has nothing to do with the origin of the virus which is the only topic that seems to make them touchy.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    It’s not exactly freakenomics to point out how many masks are made in China though.
    - blago 5y ago
      The GP was suggesting that China was somehow opposed to wearing masks.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        I think it's more that they were suggesting that an aggressive response to COVID19 would have appeared to be an anti-China move, and thus further jeopardize the US relationship with China.
        maxerickson 5y ago
        Pandering to China wasn't a particular priority of the US government at the time. Is the idea that mask policy would make up for all the politicians calling it "the China virus"?

lr4444lr 5y ago

But there's another point the article is making: if mask wearing leads to people ignoring distancing because of a false sense that the mask provides them with strong enough protection that they can relax that, if this is observable how people act in aggregate, then maybe it does make sense overall not to have a mandate as a public health matter.

dboreham 5y ago
To be fair, that was at the time one of the reasons given for downplaying mask wearing.
zpeti 5y ago
Anecdotally this is absolutely true. I know several people who wear masks while sitting in a car for long period of time with someone else. I know others who think going on jam packed public transport with a mask is basically safe. The least bad are the teachers who think when you spend an hour in a classroom with 30 people a mask will keep you safe. Aerosol transmission. It won't. In an hour the air will fill with the virus if someone is infected. The original virus apparently took 15 minutes to infect in a room. If delta is minimum 6x more infectious we are talking minutes. By increasing air circulation, or meeting outside, we can reduce infections much more than if 30 people are wearing a mask inside a room for an hour.

jltsiren 5y ago

We as a society don't want administrators adhere to the scientific method. We want them to be conservative. For some reason, people don't see the consequences of action and inaction symmetrically. If an administrator chooses a risky intervention and it turns out to be the wrong choice, we hold that person more liable than another administrator who chooses inaction with equally bad consequences. Because we give administrators power and hold them liable for their choices, we expect them to avoid risky interventions out of self-interest. Early in the pandemic, experts put too much weight on the risks of improper mask use. Perhaps because they were trained to use masks in risky situations where the consequences of improper use were real. It took them some time to realize that the general public would be using masks in low-risk situations, which reduced the expected risks significantly.

mschuster91 5y ago
> For some reason, people don't see the consequences of action and inaction symmetrically. Prevention paradox. Regarding the masks, at least in Germany the problem was different... politicians knew that masks were effective but, since the stockpiles of the Cold War era had been dismantled and domestic production all but non-existent because no matter what China is going to be at least 10x cheaper, they feared a "bank run" on the few masks that were still in the country. Politicians didn't have the guts to come out and say "yes, we know that masks help, but please don't go on shopping sprees, we need every single mask there is for the hospitals".
- masklinn 5y ago
  France also did that, except it was not cold-war era: after the 2006 bird flu scare, the country decided to set up a strategic reserve, which obviously required domestic production which would go towards stockpile upkeep so there would be companies ready in case of need. In 2009 as H1N1 started ramping up the reserve had half a billion masks (and 100 million already ordered), the health minister launched buildup order to increase the stockpile to 1.7 billion (a billion surgigals and 700m N95/FFP2). After H1N1 drew down, the health minister got greatly criticised for the expense, and following the event the agency got slowly starved out: the government decided to drop FFP2s entirely, and significantly draw down the stock of surgicals. In 2013 it moved the entire thing over to private entities (companies were supposed to stock up masks for employees, imagine how stupid that idea is). Obviously this completely killed the domestic production in short order as companies were not doing jack shit, and even if they had they’d have bought chinese production. As soon as 2015 all the companies set up after 2006 had folded, and domestic production capabilities were essentially gone. In 2016, the agency which had been specifically set up to oversee pandemic preparation and response to pandemics was killed, officially “folded” into a more general public health agency, after having been slowly starved of funds for years. When COVID-19 hit, the country had no production capabilities (500 million masks a year) and the stock was essentially nil (about 150 million masks, 3 weeks worth of healthcare demand alone).

throwoutway 5y ago

> medicine has not fully embraced the scientific method but some strange "evidence-based" variant. Why would you not want to follow a conservative, evidence-based variant of the scientific method? > During the early stages of the pandemic, high ranking officials suggested we should not use masks because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols. And this was a catastrophic decision. And the current administration continues to employ this official and give them a microphone

MrPatan 5y ago
Because apparently they are too dumb to evaluate low risk-low cost interventions like wearing a mask in a different way from high risk-high cost interventions like taking a new drug.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  What happens when different people perceive the cost of these measures differently though? That's half the problem here, with anti-maskers screaming that they can't breathe. You can try forcing them, like we're doing now, and they'll just take off their mask to cough and sneeze like half the passengers in my last flight + take every possible option to take it off + wear it off their nose to begin with.

dboreham 5y ago

> because it was not yet "proven" the virus was transmitted via aerosols My recollection was that it was much worse. They definitively and aggressively said that it was _not_ transmitted via aerosols.

djdjjrjrjr 5y ago
This echos my partner’s experience (the treat covid in an icu). This was almost a year un with some plausible evidence and several countries saying they thought aerosol transmission was likely. Yet the key agencies and experts here were aggressively saying aerosol transmission was very unlikely.
bmn__ 5y ago
The WHO disseminated the information that it was not transmissible at all. "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus"
- sdflhasjd 5y ago
  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. These two statements don't say the same thing, although people do interpret it that way.
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    That logic works on the assumption of science and cooperation that we are all telling each other the truth so that everyone may benefit. I posit that's not what happened, there was no absent evidence. The NHC knew full well that they had (another) SARS on their hands in January 2020, but lied to the WHO because they were directed by the party to suppress the findings for the usual reasons (don't rock the boat, save face on the global stage, keep the populace under control). The WHO took this false information and neglected to verify it before disseminating it, so they are complicit in the affair.

gpapilion 5y ago

I disagree. We knew masks would help, and medical professionals were using them. Basically I kept hearing only n95 I’d effective, or you’ll use them wrong. We know masks would help more with larger droplets, yet we persisted with the lie.

marcosdumay 5y ago

> And this was a catastrophic decision. To be fair, there was also a shortage of masks, so I don't think the consequences would be much better if they acted correctly. The worst result was reducing the confidence of the people in health authorities. We are still to pay the price for that.

emodendroket 5y ago
That played into their thinking, according to what officials like Fauci have said later in interviews. They didn't want to encourage people to just buy up scarce masks. But if you ask me this was extremely shortsighted because turning it into a controversial political football was the worst thing that could have happened.
- vkou 5y ago
  Given what that qanonsense manages to turn the least controversial things into political football, and doesn't care for whether or not there are any facts backing their position, it wouldn't have mattered. Republicans would have just started complaining about it in March, instead of whichever later date the CDC changed their guidance. The first rule of politics is to never let a good crisis go to waste. The second rule of politics is to always piss on whatever your opponents are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    They had an opportunity to get everyone to act unanimously, avoiding that issue, and they squandered it.
  - jquery 5y ago
    Great point about Qanon and facts not being necessary. The fact we keep having the same argument on HN about masks is proof that it doesn’t really matter what Fauci did back then. It’s just weak justification for current bad behavior.
    - 5y ago

idontwantthis 5y ago

This was particularly maddening because, technically, they were right about it not being "airborne". By definition it wasn't "airborne". Unfortunately the definition of "airborne" was completely nonsensical. "Airborne" required the droplets to be below a certain size, when that clearly had nothing to do with whether or not it travelled long distances through the air. It took a lot of frustrating work by scientists who knew what the hell they were talking about to convince the high ranking officials to stop killing people.

emodendroket 5y ago

People try to convince me that "nobody could have known masks were effective for respiratory illness until the science came in" like the doctor's office didn't have surgical masks specifically for people with flu-like illness well before anybody had ever heard of COVID-19.

gopher_space 5y ago
I mean, logically speaking, if one person is telling you to wear a mask and another person is telling you not to, you should probably be wearing two.
chrischattin 5y ago
Masks have been heavily studied re viral transmission and been show to have zero effect. It’s like people are ignoring the giant body of prior scientific research. Masks aren’t a new idea in medicine.
- andi999 5y ago
  Can you point to the publications which show the zero effect? Cursory scan found that there are effects: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01428.x?casa_token=-Q6bp-7NdA0AAAAA%3AgIp4OWTEbLn6wn4Ku9jYZNiDEUJ6VvpzI2rMjlxBcvDkHQ5_p8Lsb1X9_dhMiqsrNKq7kqCyef7Qeg https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6924...
  - chrischattin 5y ago
    Sure. Here’s a meta of 14 studies. But, there are hundreds saying the same thing… “In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks (RR 0.78, 95% CI 0.51–1.20; I2 = 30%, p = 0.25)” https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article Also note, what you posted is not a scientific study. It’s a made up model. Real world evidence is falling in line with previous scientific knowledge. Countries w/out mask mandates have no statistical difference in transmission, as expected. But, the whole thing has been politicized.

pantalaimon 5y ago

To me it seemed more like it was because there was not a great enough supply of masks, so to avoid having the general population buy them all up but to save them for medical workers, this message was communicated.

ekianjo 5y ago
Which is criminal in any way you look at it.
DFHippie 5y ago
I remember this being explicitly stated: please leave the masks for front line workers. In the US in the early days of the pandemic one item that kept reappearing in the news was the insufficiency of the PPE supply, including masks. The Trump administration was getting pounded on (outside of his friendly media) for the insufficiency of its efforts to remedy this. They were leaving it up to the states to duke it out among themselves. Supplies, including masks, were being horded and then resold at exorbitant prices. Jared was in the news for a shady deal relating to acquiring masks. There were news stories about people selling defective masks. I don't understand how this all seems to have dropped out of everyone's memory.

jvvw 5y ago

I assumed that we were not told to use masks here in the UK because there was a limited supply of them at the time and they didn't want that supply diverted from medical settings.

verisimi 5y ago

> In the past, medicine was practiced without adhering to the scientific method. This is luckily no longer the case. Cool story bro, but I disagree. If we were following the scientific method how to explain why 70% of studies cannot be reproduced? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Political_repercussions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Political_r... "A similar survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility showed that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments." Not to mention that basically all studies are paid for by one of only 3 (connected) sources - military, government or corporations. If you control the purse strings, you decide what to (or not to) study. Which explains all sorts of basic 'anomalies' - such as that we don't know what the best sort of diet is for us.

imtringued 5y ago
>Which explains all sorts of basic 'anomalies' - such as that we don't know what the best sort of diet is for us. It took way too long to figure out that absolute LDL cholesterol levels predict nothing and that only oxidized LDL (even at extremely small concentrations) is a predictor for heart disease.
- virtuallynathan 5y ago
  I would say very few in the medical community would even agree to that

flerovium 5y ago

It is likely this was to stop people from buying masks in order to allow medical professionals to buy them. Deliberate misleading may be worse than a mistake, but it probably wasn't because of the scientific method.