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> Good thing that since then we've gathered extensive evidence supporting their effectiveness. The US conducted zero RCTs, so we don't actually have high quali

> Good thing that since then we've gathered extensive evidence supporting their effectiveness. The US conducted zero RCTs, so we don't actually have high quality evidence supporting masking. RCTs conducted in other countries showed a small but not statistically significant difference with masking. When I say masking I mean those silly cloth and "surgical" masks, not N95s and similar which definitely make a big difference. > The crook of our arms aren't filtering viruses like an N95 mask would but somehow it still helps. Maybe it helps with other common viruses that spread through large droplets on surfaces, but for an airborne virus like covid that spreads almost like measles it might not at all.

autoexec 4y ago
> The US conducted zero RCTs I'm sure many researchers would have loved to do more controlled research, but for some reason people weren't lining up to participate in trails where the participants get infected by Covid and then try to infect others in a lab setting. This is one of those things where it should be easy to devise high quality experiments, but ethics make it impossible. In the end we got a bunch of people doing the best research they could. That meant studies with serious flaws and limitations. Some variants spread more easily than others, the amount of community spread varied with time/location, some people didn't make it all the way through studies, mask usage couldn't be constantly monitored to ensure compliance, etc. Most research looked only at how many people got sick when masked or unmasked instead of how the virus spread when already infected people were masked vs unmasked. We still managed to come up with a ton of research (including RCTs done elsewhere) which, taken in totality, showed that any kind of masking helped to some degree. > Maybe it helps with other common viruses that spread through large droplets on surfaces, but for an airborne virus like covid that spreads almost like measles it might not at all. Covid also spreads through droplets, but generally airborne ones. Getting any of those same droplets stuck to surfaces like the inside of your arm or the inside of mask keeps them out of the air other people breathe, but obviously you can't get all of them. Since how much virus gets breathed in matters, reducing the amount of droplets that go out into the air can mean the difference between getting someone sick or not, as well as how sick they get if their immune system can't respond fast enough to prevent the virus from establishing a foothold in the body. I think the effectiveness of cloth masks declined as the virus evolved, and N95 masks were always going to be the better option, but anything is certainly going to be better than nothing.

autoexec 4y ago

> The US conducted zero RCTs I'm sure many researchers would have loved to do more controlled research, but for some reason people weren't lining up to participate in trails where the participants get infected by Covid and then try to infect others in a lab setting. This is one of those things where it should be easy to devise high quality experiments, but ethics make it impossible. In the end we got a bunch of people doing the best research they could. That meant studies with serious flaws and limitations. Some variants spread more easily than others, the amount of community spread varied with time/location, some people didn't make it all the way through studies, mask usage couldn't be constantly monitored to ensure compliance, etc. Most research looked only at how many people got sick when masked or unmasked instead of how the virus spread when already infected people were masked vs unmasked. We still managed to come up with a ton of research (including RCTs done elsewhere) which, taken in totality, showed that any kind of masking helped to some degree. > Maybe it helps with other common viruses that spread through large droplets on surfaces, but for an airborne virus like covid that spreads almost like measles it might not at all. Covid also spreads through droplets, but generally airborne ones. Getting any of those same droplets stuck to surfaces like the inside of your arm or the inside of mask keeps them out of the air other people breathe, but obviously you can't get all of them. Since how much virus gets breathed in matters, reducing the amount of droplets that go out into the air can mean the difference between getting someone sick or not, as well as how sick they get if their immune system can't respond fast enough to prevent the virus from establishing a foothold in the body. I think the effectiveness of cloth masks declined as the virus evolved, and N95 masks were always going to be the better option, but anything is certainly going to be better than nothing.