Masks for Covid: Updating the Evidence

https://www.fast.ai/2022/07/04/updated-masks-evidence/

by susiecambria • 4 years ago

40 20 4 years ago

alleging that “Respirators are not necessary to protect children from COVID-19 because of the astoundingly low risk COVID-19 presents to them”, and that in fact wearing masks involves “existing well-documented harms”. There hasn’t been any documented harms to children from wearing masks.

This type of blanket disregard is exactly the thing that pushes people to oppose these sentiments.

There is evidence that covering up children's faces has significant impact psychologically and developmentally.

Making a claim such as this and in the typical weak-willed academic fashion "any documented harm", appealing to some unknown authority that will provide documentation to substantiate what parents are seeing in real time...

It's the type of offhand remark that, when I read it, places the credibility of the author immediately in question because the attitude is pervasive.

jorl17• 4 years ago

Genuinely curious: can you point me to this evidence?

upsidesinclude3• 4 years ago

There are studies widely available just regarding health (0). The other reasons are equally valid if not moreso (1,2)

0. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

1. https://www.med.upenn.edu/CEP/assets/user-content/documents/...

2. https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/mandatory-masking-of-sc...

collyw3• 4 years ago

They are desperate to retroactively "prove" that this nonsense measure "works", when it is obvious from real world data that they don't. Dehumanizing nonsense.

The Bangladesh study was dreadful. A good explanation of why here: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/bangladesh-mask-study-do-...

Some real world data here: https://rationalground.com/more-mask-charts/

epups4• 4 years ago

I'm sorry but both your sources are dreadful. The first one is an anonymous blogger who is at war with capitalization, and who constantly makes edgy points that are clearly addressed in the original study. The second is a self-evident exercise in futility.

thedrbrian• 4 years ago

Funny how you don’t attack the ideas/content of the links , just the posters themselves.

collyw3• 4 years ago

There are 150 more studies to show what bullshit the masks are.

https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-150-comparative-st...

epups4• 4 years ago

A lot of the evidence cited here is of very low quality/interest, such as observational and correlational studies. It does cite the best study we have so far, a large-scale RCT from Bangladesh:

A report in Nature explained that researchers running a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of community mask use in Bangladesh “began by developing a strategy to promote mask wearing, with measures such as reminders from health workers in public places. This ultimately tripled mask usage, from only 13% in control villages to 42% in villages where it was encouraged”, and “then compared numbers of COVID-19 cases in control villages and the treatment communities”. They found that the number of infections in mask wearing communities decreased, with a reduction of COVID symptoms using surgical masks to 0.87 times the incidence in unmasked communities, and 0.91 times when using cloth masks.

Unfortunately they have misquoted the numbers here. Surgical masks reduced the prevalence of COVID-like symptoms by 11%, and of actual confirmed COVID cases by 9.5%, while cloth masks did about half as well [0]. So tripling the number of people wearing masks up to about 40% of the population has a very mild effect on COVID spread, and this is before Omicron. I don't think this makes a good case for mask mandates in 2022.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

desindol3• 4 years ago

Stop being a third world country and mandate ffp2/n95 masks if you have a serious outbreak. Stop arguing about cloth or surgical masks that shit was garbage three mutations ago.

sfusato• 4 years ago

Stop mandates. Double/triple/quadruple mask yourself until you feel safe enough.

Masks for Covid: Updating the Evidence

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