My personal feeling is that it was hard to know if masks worked for the general populace before Covid-19.
There are so many confounding variables that it very difficult to study masks from a public health side.
The best approximation was studies of health professionals in hospitals or clinics which doesn't exactly translate for a multitude of reasons.
It's totally worth it to bend an exponential function. But the individual benefit from mask wearing in any given interaction is negligible.
Common sense seems to say that masks make s difference, but if that is the strongest argument, then why not let people decide for themselves using common sense.
The wearing of masks to combat airborne disease spread is a decidedly not a new thing. That was never a novel concept, at least since the early part of the 20th century.
Coronaviruses in general aren't a novel concept either; we have a pretty good idea how they're spread.
So, when confronted with a new coronavirus, it's a little bit stronger than "common sense" to surmise that masks will be effective to some extent. The burden of proof would be on anybody suggesting that this virus is somehow so different than other airborne disease that the wearing of masks had no benefit.
then why not let people decide for themselves using common sense.
If masks are effective to some degree, the downside to not wearing masks was that millions of additional people would suffer and die worldwide, and we would incur a financial and human cost orders of magnitude greater than the modest cost of masks.
seemingly because Trump supported vaccines but
not masks.
First I must strongly state that the idea itself makes no sense: one can wear a mask and be vaccinated; they're not competing ideas in any meaningful way.
However, at the outset of COVID-19, we certainly were not sure that there would be effective vaccines, or how long they might take to develop, or what their supply levels would be.
Therefore it made sense to take whatever (effective) measures we could, while waiting for a vaccine that was never guaranteed to exist. Nobody argues that a fire extinguisher is better than a squad of professional firefighters, but fire extinguishers can have important utility, especially while you're waiting for help to arrive.
As far as the Trump angle, perhaps you can show us a counter example, but I have seen zero evidence that anti-Trump folks have rejected vaccines because Trump favored them. It's a non-factor.
One, the liberal/progressive/whatever crowd is overwhelmingly pro-vaccination (in general) to begin with. Two, and perhaps more importantly, they're just not competing with masks in any way. Masks are imperfect; vaccines are more effective but also imperfect and not approved for all people even today. That is how you deal with many if not most threats in the real world: multiple layers of imperfect defences.
Though in this particular case, I don't really remember him being all that positive about vaccines for Covid or in general.
Here's a publication worrying about him undermining vaccines before Covid was a thing: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5678397/
Which is another data point to support the general principle.
In this case, the combination of masks and vaccines might have been required for a long time.
(hacker news analogy: "just in case Rust doesn't remove all defects, we are still going to need to debug"
* Various studies of droplet propagation, which show well-fitting masks reduce droplets significantly. In theory, this should reduce spread.
* Many confounded observational and cohort studies tied to voluntary compliance with mask guidelines that show a lower risk of infection or secondary transmission. They are confounded because voluntary compliance with this measure increases the likelihood of general caution. Many show somewhat large effect sizes.
* Many population based trend-line studies/other ecological studies that show post requiring it as a public health measure in various environments, that daily case counts began to decline by .4% to 2.0% per day.
The studies in the second category showing larger effects are generally inconsistent with the third category, because the results in the third would be much bigger if the effect was real. And even the third category isn't great, because the mask requirement measures weren't instituted in a vacuum independent of other controls.
I wonder if we’re splitting hairs, so what if mask wearing is confounded with other voluntary measures of general caution?
For me the take away is that some people take precaution, and some don’t.
Another measured case growth in a hospital community where there was a very strictly enforced mandate for patients compared to the rate of case growth before, so compliance is a small factor.
It's very likely that masks help. It's also very likely that the effect is relatively small. But even a tiny effect can become a big one when raised to a big power-- 1.1^20 is 6.7x growth in cases, and 1.07^20 is 3.8x.
I'd have liked this guidance change in masks to come a week or two later. Keeping another couple weeks of somewhat sharper decline in cases means a lot fewer people affected through the rest of the pandemic.
Not sure why you feel like this is a worthy hair to split.
This kind of attitude is why the western response could have been better. Western medicine is hews rigorously close to the “do no harm” ideal and interpret it that you need to have conclusive evidence before recommending a treatment, even something as harmless as mask wearing.
In Asian countries they just do it and so what if it hasn’t been demonstrated as a causal factor in a dozen studies.
Lay people see the indecision, the hemming and hawing, the hand wringing.
The cdc says shit like people shouldn’t wear masks.
This shit is actively harmful and thousands of people have died because of it.
I think it's worthwhile to have doubt and be skeptical.
I'll note that, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was saying that masks may or may not work, but they should still be recommended at a time that the CDC was implying that they might even be harmful.
This is all completely consistent with what I originally said: "To be honest, we still don't really know if masks work. They look like they probably do something, but the evidence is weak and the effect size small."