Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

maskssavelives.org

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way.

For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture".

And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

And both have situation under control compared to Italy or Spain. Even if they're literally next door to China and were exposed much earlier.

I totally agree that this is nothing more than correlation at this point. I'm all for a double-blind study and would love to better quantify mask-wearing. I am saying: wearing masks seems like an easy thing to do that could potentially limit the COVID-19 infection rate.

And it could also give people a false sense of security. Masks may be helpful, but only in concert with other practices. Distancing is going to have a much larger impact on limiting the viral spread. If you have a bunch of people wearing masks that are only partially effective start gathering in large groups, you run the risk of negating all of the good generated from distancing.

The "false sense of security" point needs evidence the same way that we need evidence on whether masks are beneficial or not. There's evidence for the latter, and, to the best of my knowledge, only speculation on the former point.

Either way, no one is advocating for mask wearing to replace other mitigation measures.

Social distancing itself doesn't work. When I go to a shop, I always see people without masks, or even having masks but not using them properly (it's supposed to be on the mouth, not on the chin). They are the people who just don't care if they kill other people by chance, even thought the radio is talking about the seriousness of coronavirus all the time in the shop.

I always use a P100 full face mask when shopping, because I have respiratiory illness and scared of getting sick and breathing even harder than I can right now.

That's nonsense. How are you going to blind people to whether they're wearing a mask or not? There's already a lot of evidence supporting the use of mask to protect the wearer and to protect transmission of infection from the wearer ("source control") both in healthcare and in community settings.

We wrote a sort of mini-review on this recently: https://medium.com/@matthiassamwald/promoting-simple-do-it-y...

They admit they don't have any evidence: "We need hard data that show a direct effect of a strong mask-wearing culture to lower COVID-19 virality. We only have antidotal research at this point."

But nevertheless "The West needs to adopt mask culture"

> And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

This seems an odd way to summarize your point. SK and Japan didn't do lockdowns, and yet fared better than any country that did.

Watch Tokyo closely over the next few days and weeks. History isn’t written yet.

My point is not about the effectiveness of lockdowns. Its about the effectiveness of masks. All 3 of those countries used masks, and I would guess China's use shot up to high once things started exploding. Based on infection numbers its not clear that masks actually had impact.

When you have a correlation plus a plausible mechanism for causation, it's not appropriate to invoke "correlation is not causation". It's literally true, but distracting. That's where you do additional studies.

Well, for one, it's insane to say "masks don't help" in the same phrase where you say "we need them for the medical staff". Which one is it?

I think the key phrase in that tweet was "general public". Medical professionals who are in close contact for many hours of the day, day after day, do not count as general public.

That is absolutely true. Still, if masks are necessary for medical professionals, it's ridiculous to say they don't help anyone else at all. And yet, that's what our government is saying.

No, masks just help. Masks are so helpful that medical workers all need masks before the general public gets any. I am being completely sincere here.

After medical workers, cashiers, delivery people & others who must be in contact with the public have plenty of appropriate personal protective equipment, then the only way to restart the economy may be to spread that equipment to people in other lines of work.

The normally extremely anti-racist newspapers in Sweden have some very weird racist thoughts about the use of masks in Asia. It's just plain idiotic.

The thinking tends to go something like: "Oh, that's just asians doing things without any scientific grounding out of group think. I know that because I read an article in The Guardian which said that wearing a mask is not a 100% protection against getting infected, so because of that they are ignorant."

The messaging has also become confused by journalist-activists attempting to do some public good by saying masks are meaningless, just so that the public doesn't hoard the masks that the people in healthcare needs.

> wearing a mask is not a 100% protection against getting infected

Most things are never 100% safe. Wearing a seatbelt does not guarantee you won't be injured in case of an accident, it's still something everyone recognizes it's a good thing to wear. I wonder what the tipping point is in terms of something being silly to do vs. it makes sense to do it for the general public. I would guess that social stigma plays a big role in it.

It's an example of fallacious thinking, "if it's not 100% effective, that means it's 0% effective".

Yet test-test-test mantra is beloved even if it's far from 100% either.

I've a feeling that West may prefer to externalise work vs Far East taking personal responsibility. Someone has to do tests, but god forbid I wear mask.

Yep. There are certain circumstances when if it's not completely effective, don't bother might be a valid heuristic, like taking completely unnecessary risks simply because you have a mask to reduce them. But reluctance to wearing masks in the West isn't coupled with a commonsense avoidance of risks altogether..

And then you end up with proposing hand-towels, bandanas and scarfs ...

I'm sorry, but the proof made on this site in support of the efficacy of wearing a face mask appears to be simply looking at a small sample of countries and finding a correlation between two variables. Completely putting the should we shouldn't we debate to one side, I'm not sure this site really contributes to this discussion in a scientific/novel way...

Country-sized groups of people are not small samples. There may be other biases but that's not one of them.

Why don't we look at Mexico and try to draw some conclusions? None of this data is useful as long as governments continue to stifle the freedom of information. Every country is hiding numbers from the international community, I'm not so sure we can trust Japan's numbers (or anyone's) to be honest...

I don't think people are against masks. The message is that we don't have enough masks for everyone. Because they are so limited, doctors and healthcare workers are at the highest risk, since they are exposed to the virus the most. Please make masks available for them as they'll have the best use for masks. They can save themselves and other people having the biggest impact.

Singapore is a small country and had capacity to distribute masks to everyone. US is at a much larger scale. I'm sure if we have a billion masks, we'd be giving a couple to everyone.

Masks are definitely effective, but US is so grossly underprepared for this pandemic that we really have to make a tough choice. Our manufacturing economy has been going downhill as we've been offshoring things to China and other countries. This is a huge blow when we can't build things that are dire to save us.

Here is a growing list of 30+ papers that back up the efficacy of masks: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLrm0pqBN_5bdyysOeoOBX4p...

Japan has low number of confirmed cases because they barely tested anyone. For example, from Feb 1st to March 18th, Japan had over 160k people who wanted to get tested, and they tested only about 5k people among them (news.bizwatch.co.kr/article/industry/2020/03/23/0001).

A few points:

- There's an ongoing effort to promote civilian use of masks, see: https://www.facebook.com/groups/640968383371577 and their document 'Hong Kong Protocol" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mvc6evI2qzU3M8MkrLSqKJBT...

- The Surgeon General may be saying not to wear masks because they have to be done correctly, you don't want to try and buy an N95 mask (at time of this writing in USA) because:

  - First responders in the US need N95 respirators right now! I donated mine and plan to make a cloth mask.

  - You might be wearing it wrong! See NIOSH's guide on facial hairstyle and respirators: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/pdfs/FacialHairWmask11282017-508.pdf

  - You need to dispose or disinfect after use.

  - Most importantly, if you're wearing an N95 with a valve, you may just be spreading the virus out if you're an asymptomatic carrier.

- People are currently looking into the best mask to wear, see https://twitter.com/lucasgonzalez/status/1242468271825313792 & https://twitter.com/magghu/status/1241361090954571781

I'm onboard with your overall message, but think it needs to be crafted a bit better.

I think you're confounding a lot of variables here... the way that Japan and South Korea have dealt with the virus are in many ways different than the way that it was handled in Italy and the US. Masks aren't necessarily as important as some of those other factors, including general cultural tendencies, such as listening to government advice or willingness to adhere to limits on movement.

It's also misleading to include the Surgeon General's tweet on this subject. This is in very specific context to having a limited supply of masks and trying to reserve them for the most at risk populations.

I'm Asian and travelling in UK around mid Feb. I'm wearing a surgical mask and everyone is giving me a weird look, there's even a male driver who take picture of me as I cross the traffic light.

Meanwhile in New York, the worst hit state in America, masks of all sorts have been illegal in public for the last 175 years. https://newyorkhistoryblog.org/2013/10/halloween-history-new... https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/240.35

Singapore should not be circled. Singapore haven't distributed masks, they don't mandate masks, they only encourage masks for sick/hospital, and NYT said on Mar 13 "most... do not wear masks out, because the government has told them it’s not needed".

Iran doesn't have 80k cases https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/

same number as shown for Italy, so copy-paste mishap?

can be, hopefully they will fix it

This entire site is an argumentative fallacy. There are many other factors involved in the spreading of viruses. Masks are not going to solve the problem and forcing people to start wearing masks isn't going to make people believe that it is a solution.

You know, in Italy you could not buy a face mask since mid January. Yes, if it were in our culture we would stockpile them at home. But I can assure everybody would use one since February, if we could get some.

A lot of the mask usages in Japan are to help with allergies

Singapore does not have a mask wearing culture. Neither has it told everyone to stay home. But it has closed borders n pubs.

CzechoSlovakia is at this point where everyone is using masks

But I guess we are still east so it does not count ;-)

Why is this flagged? Please look at the data (at link).

So some fxxers flagged this thread? Again showing why HN sucks in any emergency situation. There will always be two people who strongly disagree. (It seems like two flags is enough to kill any post.)

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