Masks help infected people not spread COVID, they are less useful at preventing uninfected from catching COVID. Everyone has to wear them though because no one knows who has COVID at any given time.
tell me, why is that 16 months into this pandemic there are no definitive studies to measure the actual effect of masks, you know one with a control and masked people? Yet it is the easiest thing to measure ever.
We can test an actual life saving vaccine (that also carries huge risks while under development) with 40K volunteers but the mask seems to elude the scrutiny.
The CDC should just do the fracking study and put this issue to rest already. Strangely they are not.
I was happily surprised to find that several reasonably applicable studies have been published in the meantime, and seem to universally support a statistically significant reduction in infections.
If you're basing your statements on literature review from ~9 months ago, I suggest that you look again, the top results on PubMed were extremely easy to find and virtually all had free public access.
Of the top of my head, relative risk reduction with vs without masks varied between 30-70% depending on the study, with absolute risk reduction more like 10% (with the absolute risk being fairly low to begin with).
All I have seen so far are studies that relate to case numbers going one way or another when a policy was made or not. Simulations, behaviors etc. Sorry that is just not convincing. Case numbers vary a lot with or without measures. In my opinion when you require masks people don't do certain things as often ... does that mean that the mask protected you?
You are sending me to search PubMed, instead of linking to a paper that operated with a randomized controlled trial. That is the typical answer one gets when asks for an RCT on masks.
I think most people aren't qualified to judge.
yet all I am asking is there an RCT study on masks where they measured actual infection rates on a subpopulation randomly assigned to wear a mask? It is not a particularly unusual design, it is regularly done for vaccines and drugs. Measuring the actual effect on the people that are assigned to each group.
I believe that there is no RCT that would indicate that masks work. I have never seen one. As I said I'd be eager to read it if there was a study like that.
For example the Cohrane review on masks analyzed many studies, none indicated that masks work:
https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-s...
> Compared with wearing no mask, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness (9 studies; 3507 people); and probably makes no difference in how many people have flu confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 3005 people).
Yet all of a sudden CDC claims masks are super effective.
On this topic a reasonably intelligent person reading a reasonably well written scientific paper can understand its strengths and weaknesses. It is not that complicated, we would be talking about simple counts: X people were enrolled, Y people got infected with masks Z people infected without masks. Yes there is statistics involved, there are corrections to be made, proper tests to be chosen, but at end we are talking about a few integer numbers and their relationships. We are not discussing the unsolved mysteries of quantum chromodynamics.
If you look at the information for multiple vaccine papers the data is detailed, granular, compelling and evident - even though I could not design or perform the same analysis myself. There is no debate there that it works.
Yet there is no similarity in the data robustness or even availability when it comes to effectiveness of masks.
I believe that there are no RCT studies on masks that would support their benefits. The Cohran review that I linked on the state of the field also comes to the same conclusion.