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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Note that I've edited my comment to better reflect my thoughts (probably since you wrote this).

I don't think you should take this one paper as some kind of definitive rebuttal on masks. You should interpret it as a reasonable summary of current evidence, as well as a not-terrible analysis of US states that poses some serious challenges to the effectiveness of mask mandates.

That said, an editorial/letter in science daily is not a rebuttal, and wikipedia is useless for politically sensitive questions. There are many papers on both sides of the issue, and it's easy to cherry-pick a set that support any particular position.

Is it the end of the discussion? No. But It's not as cut-and-dried as people make it seem. The evidence base for masks is very low-quality. The issue became political, and as with all things political today, nuance and reason were tossed out the window.

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> Regions with an early interest in face masks had milder COVID-19 epidemics, according to a new letter-to-the-editor published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. (the source of the Science Daily article: https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1164/rccm.202004-1188...)

I don't see how this is much less scientific than the non-peer-reviewed paper you posted.

A letter to an editor is not peer reviewed. It is a letter from a reader.

Both of the papers I linked to are either peer reviewed, or a pre-print in the process of review.

> a pre-print in the process of review.

So not reviewed yet.

My point is that both a preprint and a letter to the editors have not gone through a rigorous review. Preprints might be submitted for peer-review but that's no guarantee that it will be published in a reputable venue.

Equating a pre-print with a letter because they have both not gone through a review is like equating a skateboard with a car because they both have wheels.

Yes, both are text, written in the english language, shown on a webpage. Beyond that, they share no similarities.

If you think a pre-print is a better source than an academic letter (published in a reputable scientific journal, which implies at least editorial review), then lets agree to disagree.

A pre-print from legitimate researchers is a much higher standard of evidence than a letter. It's not really a matter of opinion.

If you cannot reliably judge the legitimacy of a pre-print in an area, then you aren't qualified to judge the legitimacy of any scientific comment in that area.

You keep calling it a "letter" but it is not just a "letter" in the sense that I can write a letter to you, it's a letter written by experts in the field to a top ranked scientific journal that has been editorially reviewed (by experts).

> If you cannot reliably judge the legitimacy of a pre-print in an area, then you aren't qualified to judge the legitimacy of any scientific comment in that area.

I agree, but now we are moving into the content and not just judging the book by its cover.

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