Face Masks Considerably Reduce Covid-19 Cases in Germany
iza.org
iza.org
"IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author."
I'm barely exaggerating with "verbatim": remove the parenthetical ", and you should probably be wearing a mask" as well as the quote at the end, and read it again. It could be concern-trolling any statistics paper, ever!
And what's the point, exactly? Sometimes, results from research later turn out to be wrong, and therefore it is best to completely ignore them? At some point you'll deign enough time to have passed to allow some research to be useful. But until then, you also recommend masks, because..? How is your hunch a better barometer of truth than actual research using real-world data?
Preprints that deal with the human world, or analyze human data are dangerously outside the expertise scope of the typical HN reader. Dangerous, because people walk away with wrong conclusion, rather than a "failure to parse" error.
The new typical approach of this paper is the political angle with statistical tricks to make an insignificant number significant for the main press, by coming up with exponential growth models leading up to the cited 40% number. Which is politics, not science. But even Nature ventures into politics these days, deviating from science, with wrong growth models.
The German translation would be: "Auch Kleinvieh macht Mist" Even the smallest measures are exaggerated in desperate times. Political desperation, not scientific.
Bars and clubs have for some reason re-opened contrary to rules set by the local governments, I have seen 0 proactive or reactive enforcement of any rules by police or other authorities.
Some places are enforcing mask use, in supermarkets for example every customer is required to wear a mask and take a trolley to try and keep distance between customers, but the number of people wearing masks only over their mouths and leaving their noses exposed, or simply abandoning their trolley once inside and moving very close to other people is very high.
The 1.5-2m idea is anyway a failure:
* first of all, it only allows one to dodge larger droplets.
* second of all, it's humanly impossible to respect this rule. When meeting acquaintances or friends there's a constant unconscious pull to get closer - in practice the distance is 70cm and often less. Crowded areas and narrow corridors or pathways make a mockery of it likewise.
The obsessive focus on hard to implement personal distancing and aversion to masks is embarrassing.
It is hard to not be tempted to think about several confounding variables that could have played a role in the drop that is seen, like people being more vigilant, following distance guidelines, working from home more often, the list goes on. Nevertheless, it was an interesting read.
Germany was in “lockdown” mode (in quotes because their lockdown never actually needed to be that strict due to proactive reaction) way before requiring masks, that’s why they’re such a good case study
All the things you’ve listed as potential confounding variables are much more likely to have gone in the opposite direction due to lockdown fatigue. It’s extremely unlikely that everyone suddenly got much more vigilant two months into the pandemic
Nevertheless, masks don't hurt so one should go with the Pascal's wager argument.
If one didn't know better, it all looks like business as usual.
And "saving lives" has become the new "think of the children" excuse for irrational public policy and laws. All public policy requires a cost-benefit analysis.
For example, banning cars would reduce automobile fatalities by 30,000/year in the US. But we aren't banning cars.
Going by this analogy, implementing mandatory masks is one such regulation to prevent covid infections and deaths as is implementing traffic rules to prevent automobile fatalities.
Since we have not had enough time to deeply understand the spread of this virus and its affect on all of us (unlike automobile fatalities), the state has no choice but to follow the safest policy that seems to work. But, of course, you are right to question whether this policy is the best we can do or not which remains to be seen as we witness the coming months.
Again, we don't know that.
"Doing something, anything" is not better than doing nothing.
The most successful countries at fighting the pandemic are also champions at wearing masks.
There's plenty of studies from the flu and SARS times showing that certain masks reduce the risk of an individual infection and any mask worn by an infected individual will reduce risk of transmission.
What we don't have is a peer reviewed study that masks stop a pandemic, because such a study is incredibly hard to set up and we didn't have enough pandemics yet.
Most countries are around 0.2% IFR, which you call successful, some are at around 1%. Masks just prevent infections (by about 5%), but does not influence the percentage to die when you got infected. The biggest factors (called comorbidities) for the differences are the age curve (significant drop at around >75), pre-existing conditions like diabetes, obesity, ... the effectiveness of the healthcare system, air pollution, but it could also be just two different kinds of strains. The 0.2% strain, and the 1% strain, because there's a clear geographical line between the two.
At the beginning it was the 45° parallel north latitude, at the end it was the Germany/France border, 10° east longitude.
The R differences on the other hand are clearly influenced by the measures: social distancing, travel restrictions, hygiene, lockdown, masks,...
But I wonder where you got the 5% from, because Hong Kong, South Korea and others are doing spectacular at preventing infections compared to e.g. the US or Europe, much better than 5%.
More generally, anything mandatory is going to generate some personal freedom backlash. It's a big political risk.
We have good evidence that distance is important. We have poor evidence that masks work. We think masks work. They have a plausible mechanism of action, but we struggle to find benefit from the RCTs that have been done, and we have to use other statistical methods on existing data to find a benefit. We need better data for masks. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(20)3...
Of course then there are non-physical risks like social perception, social relationships, discomfort and so on and so forth which are more difficult to quantify.