10 ms·

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch y

by cortic 5y ago

Happened in the UK as well, Boris (and to be fair the WHO) told us masks were counter productive. That they might get you to stand closer to people and touch your face more, increasing your chances of getting Covid.. All presumably to save a mask shortage; But we know, and they should have known, that the public doesn't buy the same kind of masks that our NHS buys and there never was going to be any shortage. This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK as this policy lasted for six months and it undoubtedly was part of the reason care-homes were hit as hard in the first wave. Now here we are a year later, and no one has been held accountable, no talk of this in the media, no anger. Not only were we treated like children, we were treated like children by incompetent heartless leaders that got a lot of us killed, and there seems to be no corrective process for this.

chimprich 5y ago
> All presumably to save a mask shortage I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more. Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around." I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing. I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions. > no talk of this in the media This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.
- elihu 5y ago
  As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer. The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    "the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer." They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift. See the graphs here, where the numbers from different nearby regions are overlayed on the same graph with the times of mask mandate rule changes: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a... That's why when you dig into the citations of a paper claiming masks work, you invariably find some invalid evidence, like they'll be citing model outputs as evidence of real-world effects, or they'll cite a study whose CI includes zero, etc.
    - chimprich 5y ago
      This is nonsense. You can't do comparisons like that. For example, mask mandates tend to get imposed when cases are rising, and removed when they fall. To say they have no effect on cases is to confuse cause and effect. The conspiracy site you link to has no interest in looking at the data dispassionately. There's a reason why we have data science and peer review to investigate these things.
      - native_samples 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
> It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK Is there solid evidence anywhere that masks are important one way or the other? While it is plausible that a mask could prevent an infection in an encounter, I've not yet seen anyone waving something conclusive around that masks prevent infections over the course of a pandemic. I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.
- headsoup 5y ago
  No there isn't. The studies touted have serious issues, but because they align to 'consensus' nobody checks, not daring be called some misinformation agent or 'anti-vaxxer.' They knew this after sars. It's not hard to find the evidence from after then. It's just a nice visual way to make people feel safer against the thing they're told to fear.
- kdbg 5y ago
  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 Unfortunately many parts of this paper are beyond me, but this study does appear to find that community level masking has an impact, but it is a study that used actual communities and tracked compliance (and impact of different interventions on encouraging making)
  - Axien 5y ago
    Actually look at the peer review of that study done by Cornell and released this December. When the actual data was analyzed it showed masks had no effect.
    - twic 5y ago
      Interesting - do you have a link by any chance?
  - twic 5y ago
    AFAIK, this is the only really good study of mask-wearing. It's large (300k people!), and it's randomised. It tried two kinds of masks, "surgical" and "cloth": > We used high-quality surgical masks that had had a filtration efficiency of 95% [standard deviation (SD) = 1%]; this is substantially higher than the filtration efficiency of the cloth masks we designed, which had a filtration efficiency of 37% (SD = 6%). These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings (54). The key result: > We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.1% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.81%; treatment prevalence = 0.72%). Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all. (aPR = 0.94 [0.78,1.10]; control: 0.67%; treatment: 0.61%). It's a shame that even with such a large study, the phenomenon is so noisy that we can't get a strong signal here. But i think the takeaway is that masking has an effect, but it is rather small. There's a lot more detail in the paper. Including this gem: > We find no evidence that any of our village-level or household-level treatments, other than mask color, impacted mask-wearing. For mask-color, we see marginally significant differences, small in magnitude. In surgical mask villages, blue masks were more likely to be observed than green (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.03, [-0.00,0.06]), and in cloth mask villages, red more likely than purple (adjusted percentage point difference = -0.02, [-0.04,-0.00]). Text message reminders, incentives for village-leaders, or explicit commitment signals explain little of the observed increase in mask-wearing. Compared to self-protection messaging alone, altruistic messaging had no greater impact on mask-wearing, and twice-weekly text messages and a verbal commitment had no significant effects.
Ntrails 5y ago
Note that we are still spending a fortune globally on enhanced cleaning regimes and special anti viral detergents to prevent an airbourne virus getting onto our hands.
tristor 5y ago
> This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. I attended FOSDEM in Brussels in 2020 right at the beginning of February, after COVID was identified, but before the big push of lockdowns in March. I had to transit through Atlanta to get to EU, and had a long layover so left the airport to visit a friend. While I was in the airport and flying, I wore a P100 rated half-mask respirator with cartridge filters the entire time. Recently the TSA and airlines had been experimenting (and now fully implemented) facial recognition for identity verification in US airports rather than handing the TSA your ID. It's supposed to be optional, but I got delayed 20 minutes in an otherwise empty line re-entering Atlanta because the TSA agent on duty wanted to argue with me to take my mask off and how masks were ineffective, and that's what the doctors/CDC (based in Atlanta) said, and how arrogant I was that I thought I knew more than the CDC. I kept my mask on. I didn't get COVID, and in fact still haven't had it at this point (although I'll likely get Omicron) by following common sense precautions and being vaccinated. The telling people not to wear masks or buy masks was one of the biggest things for me that immediately let me know that the public was being lied to and manipulated. I've made a point of keeping up on the latest research and sharing what I know with family and friends directly, including preparatory advice. I already had a "pandemic prep kit" in my prep supplies, which had plenty of respirators, and I shared them with family and friends early on when they were hard to get. To me, it's utterly obscene how often even /basic/ easily verifiable facts were lied about to the public, masks especially. Now that this has been politicized as an issue in the US, it's just made it harder. Here I am knowing the government lied consistently throughout the pandemic to everyone and that many of the "precautions" were nonsense, but the entire time advocating masks and vaccines... nobody on any political aisle likes truthful information since their selection of "truth" cannot match with reality.

by cortic 5y ago

chimprich 5y ago

> All presumably to save a mask shortage I don't think so. There seemed to be genuine uncertainty early on in the pandemic about whether masks would be helpful. We didn't know if the virus was airborne and there was a question about whether the masks would actually be helpful. For example, the masks could have had very low benefit but encouraged people to touch their face more. Whitty in March 2020: "In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that. The only people we do sometimes use masks for are people who have got an infection and that is to help them to stop it spreading around." I think this was a mistake: common sense suggests that they should have had some effect (and the evidence ended up supporting this). But I don't see any evidence for it being deliberate misinformation to avoid pressure on mask sourcing. I also think that this one mistake should not be held up as the key problem in the pandemic. Public health information in the UK has generally been very good. Most of the missteps in the pandemic were from poor governmental decisions. > no talk of this in the media This is absolutely not true. I've seen this issue discussed ad nauseum.

elihu 5y ago
As far as I know, the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer. The logical flaw then was that telling people to just wear masks if they're infected doesn't work very well if highly contagious people don't know they're infected, which turned out to be the case. I can see where it might have taken awhile to figure that out, but still the lack of transparency about how these decisions were made and the resulting credibility deficit is a problem.
- native_samples 5y ago
  "the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer." They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift. See the graphs here, where the numbers from different nearby regions are overlayed on the same graph with the times of mask mandate rule changes: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a... That's why when you dig into the citations of a paper claiming masks work, you invariably find some invalid evidence, like they'll be citing model outputs as evidence of real-world effects, or they'll cite a study whose CI includes zero, etc.
  - chimprich 5y ago
    This is nonsense. You can't do comparisons like that. For example, mask mandates tend to get imposed when cases are rising, and removed when they fall. To say they have no effect on cases is to confuse cause and effect. The conspiracy site you link to has no interest in looking at the data dispassionately. There's a reason why we have data science and peer review to investigate these things.
    - native_samples 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

> It lead to some number of deaths, probably 10s of thousands in the UK Is there solid evidence anywhere that masks are important one way or the other? While it is plausible that a mask could prevent an infection in an encounter, I've not yet seen anyone waving something conclusive around that masks prevent infections over the course of a pandemic. I've managed to avoid the coronavirus for 2 years now and as far as I can tell the future still has me getting COVID in it. I'm still not clear what role the mask is meant to play in that forecast.

headsoup 5y ago
No there isn't. The studies touted have serious issues, but because they align to 'consensus' nobody checks, not daring be called some misinformation agent or 'anti-vaxxer.' They knew this after sars. It's not hard to find the evidence from after then. It's just a nice visual way to make people feel safer against the thing they're told to fear.
kdbg 5y ago
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 Unfortunately many parts of this paper are beyond me, but this study does appear to find that community level masking has an impact, but it is a study that used actual communities and tracked compliance (and impact of different interventions on encouraging making)
- Axien 5y ago
  Actually look at the peer review of that study done by Cornell and released this December. When the actual data was analyzed it showed masks had no effect.
  - twic 5y ago
    Interesting - do you have a link by any chance?
- twic 5y ago
  AFAIK, this is the only really good study of mask-wearing. It's large (300k people!), and it's randomised. It tried two kinds of masks, "surgical" and "cloth": > We used high-quality surgical masks that had had a filtration efficiency of 95% [standard deviation (SD) = 1%]; this is substantially higher than the filtration efficiency of the cloth masks we designed, which had a filtration efficiency of 37% (SD = 6%). These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings (54). The key result: > We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.1% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.81%; treatment prevalence = 0.72%). Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all. (aPR = 0.94 [0.78,1.10]; control: 0.67%; treatment: 0.61%). It's a shame that even with such a large study, the phenomenon is so noisy that we can't get a strong signal here. But i think the takeaway is that masking has an effect, but it is rather small. There's a lot more detail in the paper. Including this gem: > We find no evidence that any of our village-level or household-level treatments, other than mask color, impacted mask-wearing. For mask-color, we see marginally significant differences, small in magnitude. In surgical mask villages, blue masks were more likely to be observed than green (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.03, [-0.00,0.06]), and in cloth mask villages, red more likely than purple (adjusted percentage point difference = -0.02, [-0.04,-0.00]). Text message reminders, incentives for village-leaders, or explicit commitment signals explain little of the observed increase in mask-wearing. Compared to self-protection messaging alone, altruistic messaging had no greater impact on mask-wearing, and twice-weekly text messages and a verbal commitment had no significant effects.

Ntrails 5y ago

Note that we are still spending a fortune globally on enhanced cleaning regimes and special anti viral detergents to prevent an airbourne virus getting onto our hands.

tristor 5y ago

> This encouraged examples like; people walking up to you in the supermarket explaining why you should take your mask off. I attended FOSDEM in Brussels in 2020 right at the beginning of February, after COVID was identified, but before the big push of lockdowns in March. I had to transit through Atlanta to get to EU, and had a long layover so left the airport to visit a friend. While I was in the airport and flying, I wore a P100 rated half-mask respirator with cartridge filters the entire time. Recently the TSA and airlines had been experimenting (and now fully implemented) facial recognition for identity verification in US airports rather than handing the TSA your ID. It's supposed to be optional, but I got delayed 20 minutes in an otherwise empty line re-entering Atlanta because the TSA agent on duty wanted to argue with me to take my mask off and how masks were ineffective, and that's what the doctors/CDC (based in Atlanta) said, and how arrogant I was that I thought I knew more than the CDC. I kept my mask on. I didn't get COVID, and in fact still haven't had it at this point (although I'll likely get Omicron) by following common sense precautions and being vaccinated. The telling people not to wear masks or buy masks was one of the biggest things for me that immediately let me know that the public was being lied to and manipulated. I've made a point of keeping up on the latest research and sharing what I know with family and friends directly, including preparatory advice. I already had a "pandemic prep kit" in my prep supplies, which had plenty of respirators, and I shared them with family and friends early on when they were hard to get. To me, it's utterly obscene how often even /basic/ easily verifiable facts were lied about to the public, masks especially. Now that this has been politicized as an issue in the US, it's just made it harder. Here I am knowing the government lied consistently throughout the pandemic to everyone and that many of the "precautions" were nonsense, but the entire time advocating masks and vaccines... nobody on any political aisle likes truthful information since their selection of "truth" cannot match with reality.