7 ms·

What horrible irresponsible stuff about masks are you referring to?

timr 2y ago
Literally hundreds of papers. Basically any paper published about masks during the pandemic was bad, save for a few RCTs. But I'll give you one particularly egregious example that comes to mind. The "Boston school mask study" in NEJM [1] claimed that mask mandates led to an almost 30% reduction in school cases during the pandemic. Subsequent reanalysis of the work -- including going back to the original source data -- showed that not only is that not true, the researchers blatantly cherry-picked their data, and also chose analysis time windows to optimize their desired outcome. The original paper should be retracted. Full stop. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  Maybe I missed it, but for [2], I'm not seeing any info about whether testing rates were consistent between schools with mask mandates and schools without. (Considering that tests were as politicized as masks, I don't know if there's a correlation between "didn't require masks" and "didn't require testing.")
  - dekhn 2y ago
    I think you're wasting your time arguing with a True Believer.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - timr 2y ago
    > I'm not seeing any info about whether testing rates were consistent between schools with mask mandates and schools without. The paper tells you that the Boston and Chelsea districts were outliers in terms of testing in the first sentence of the Results. But it's essential to the claims of the original paper, so you should look there, and cross-apply the same criticism. If you can't prove that testing rates were consistent across schools, how can you make the claim of a 30% increase in positivity? (Hint: Cowager et al. provide the data buried in a supplement. They show that testing practices, in fact, were neither consistent nor stable across time. Both violate the requirements for applying the statistical method used in the original paper.)

timr 2y ago

Literally hundreds of papers. Basically any paper published about masks during the pandemic was bad, save for a few RCTs. But I'll give you one particularly egregious example that comes to mind. The "Boston school mask study" in NEJM [1] claimed that mask mandates led to an almost 30% reduction in school cases during the pandemic. Subsequent reanalysis of the work -- including going back to the original source data -- showed that not only is that not true, the researchers blatantly cherry-picked their data, and also chose analysis time windows to optimize their desired outcome. The original paper should be retracted. Full stop. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974

spondylosaurus 2y ago
Maybe I missed it, but for [2], I'm not seeing any info about whether testing rates were consistent between schools with mask mandates and schools without. (Considering that tests were as politicized as masks, I don't know if there's a correlation between "didn't require masks" and "didn't require testing.")
- dekhn 2y ago
  I think you're wasting your time arguing with a True Believer.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- timr 2y ago
  > I'm not seeing any info about whether testing rates were consistent between schools with mask mandates and schools without. The paper tells you that the Boston and Chelsea districts were outliers in terms of testing in the first sentence of the Results. But it's essential to the claims of the original paper, so you should look there, and cross-apply the same criticism. If you can't prove that testing rates were consistent across schools, how can you make the claim of a 30% increase in positivity? (Hint: Cowager et al. provide the data buried in a supplement. They show that testing practices, in fact, were neither consistent nor stable across time. Both violate the requirements for applying the statistical method used in the original paper.)