Masks Don’t Work – A review of science relevant to Covid-19 social policy
researchgate.net
researchgate.net
Yes, sure, masks are ineffective if you define "effective" as "a complete barrier to infection". Congratulations, you've successfully unmasked the the grand mask conspiracy.
Except that definition is next to useless. What masks do do is reduce the amount of aerosolized particles that are emitted and inhaled. It's not meant to be a protective barrier, it's meant to be a numbers game.
Saying masks are useless is like saying you can catch Covid from your mailman, so if you accept mail packages you may as well just go to a concert.
It's all about volume and probability of contact.
I'd also be interested to hear someone with more knowledge of the science weigh in on the studies he cites. If masks are as completely useless as he claims, I would expect the (already high) infection rate among medical providers to be even higher, at 100%. What gives?
1) They prevent the wearer from getting the virus from other people.
2) The prevent the wearer giving the virus to other people.
People talk a lot about viral load, and about breathing droplets deep into your lungs. So, (2) doesn't make much sense to me. The person with mild covid-19 infection places a mask around their mouth and nose, thus trapping all those infected droplets, which then get breathed back in. If the mechanism of action really is "breathing the virus causes severe infection" why would you want to trap the virus by your mouth and nose?
> If masks are as completely useless as he claims
They're not saying they're completely useless. They're saying that lots of the people wearing masks expect 100% protection, even if they're doing fucking stupid things. There's absolutely no point in both wearing a mask and going to a football match. https://www.thenational.ae/image/policy:1.998514:1585469410/...
If we're going to force people to wear masks we need to make sure they're wearing them correctly, because an incorrectly worn mask may do more harm than good.
It's also stated, "The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked". Why when I look at a CDC article on masks does it say N95 is effective on this particle size? Unless the author is using "blocked" to mean "100% prevented from moving through the filter", which would be a higher standard than N95 masks claim to have.
This is a vacuous statement in this context and adds nothing to the discussion, because you can never prove causation via a study/experiment, only reject the null hypothesis.
Can be found in the document under "Supporting Information" at the following address:
I prefer the papers mentioned here (which argue against my anti-mask position and are changing my mind a bit): https://www.fast.ai/2020/04/13/masks-summary/
Anyone want to take bets before this information is tweeted out by potus and on infowars?
I really have to wonder if the people pushing this have some kind of agenda.
Cloth masks are a complete joke as far as preventing spread unless you're someone who constantly sprays spittle when they talk. If you are that person then no one wants to be in spray range already . Cloth masks will barely filter dust out. The anecdotal story I share about the masks being more about a social construct than a medical one is this. My wife works in reception at a medical office. They started requiring all staff to wear makes but those in non-paitent facing roles (like her) only get cloth masks. They acknowledged that the cloth masks did nothing to prevent the spread but it was important to make masks socially acceptable.
The papers closing does seem to have the conspiracy angle to it which I can't comment on if this is the case or not but overall there does seem to be quite a bit of "virology theater" going on with policy making.
There's a reason masks have been commonplace in Asia for many years now: they're meant to protect society, not the wearer. When someone thinks they're sick in Japan, they're supposed to wear a mask to keep everyone else from getting sick: it's good manners. It only works when lots of people are doing the same thing.
Similarly, the cloth masks are actually called "surgical masks", because they're normally used in surgery. They have absolutely nothing to do with keeping the surgeon safe from the patient; they're in place to keep the patient, who has a huge gaping wound in his body, from being infected by droplets from the surgeon as the surgeon bends over the wound site, and is breathing and talking to other people.
I've made two hepa cloth masks using online guides (I know, I'm like an expert now /s) for my partner and I and from my testing they filter out a non-trivial amount of undesirable particles. We use a pipe cleaner to add rigidity to the upper mask and form a better seal. I've lit a cigarette right in front of my mask and been completely unable to smell it. Does this offer us 100% protection? No of course not, is it better than not wearing one? Yes, of course.
However, in many studies there's a consistent trend toward masks doing something, in the sense that measures of dispersion are attenuated with masks vs not.
This paper is pretty poor in that it commits the classic statistical blunder of equating multiple nonsignificant results with overall effect size. It's very hastily put together.
One of the meta-analyses cited is an example of some of these issues (Offeddu, V. et al. 2017). You can see there's few studies and the ones included result in a nonsignificant effect, but it's almost significant and in the intuitively expected direction (PPE having an effect). But then there's issue of publication biases etc.
My general impression is that the truth is somewhere in between, maybe closer to what this essay is arguing in the sense that masks are much less effective than people think, but probably not actually technically correct in that masks probably have some effect.