Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They were useless. (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Everyone wore masks during the 1918 flu pandemic. They were useless. (2020)

washingtonpost.com

9 pointssb0578 comments

This was an old article from April 2020. With regard to Covid, there is substantial evidence that masks prevent the spread of the virus. See e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7... and https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118.

Your first reference notes: "Our evidence supports the role of mask-wearing in controlling SARS-CoV-2 transmission; however, this ecological study cannot inform questions of causality or generalisable biological mechanisms. It is difficult to disentangle individuals’ engagement in mask-wearing from their adoption of other preventive hygiene practices, and mask-wearing might be serving as a proxy for other risk avoidance behaviours not queried (eg, avoiding crowded spaces)"

This article doesn't even pretend to provide any supporting evidence for its bold headline assertion. It just gives a bit of background info about masks in 1918, and ends.

Such writing is irresponsible in a pandemic.

It's important to not conflate deaths in that time with deaths caused by the flu. Most of the deaths turned out to have been caused by bacterial pneumonia: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/bacterial-pneu...

Logic issues with this: gauze and handkerchief masks were suboptimal perhaps but probably not useless. This is also an unrepeatable experiment - without masks it might have been worse, closing public spaces might have been better, etc.

> This is also an unrepeatable experiment

This frustrates any discussion about the pandemic and government response (and more broadly practically any question about govt policy & history), namely that these assertions always resort to counterfactuals.

So what happened and what could have happened with different policies is essentially unfalsifiable.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Indeed. People properly wearing and using N95 and above level protection would likely have fared better than people wearing fabric masks, back then.

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