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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

> The parallels between COVID and our post-9/11 reaction are eerie.

I don't see the same parallels. After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces. Widespread denial and resistance to anything inconveniencing them. Whereas after 9/11 people were willing to put up with 3+ hour wait times and tons of other restrictions.

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Mass loss of life. Novel way in which people died. People dying randomly (hard to avoid). General hysteria. Paranoia over a minority group. Moral outrage against anyone not falling inline politically. Overreaching government plans to keep people safe. Petty symbolism (freedom fries/masks) to sort the moral from the immoral.

Should I go on?

You think masks are petty symbolism? I think that kind of trolling just raises the temperature here, which I'd like to avoid, so no, please, do not go on.

Endless studies and real-world data showing no efficacy and half the world doesn't care. A new one every week, nobody cares, they're stuck in their religion.

Last week: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/

Conclusions: There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.

Also last week: large Bangladesh study showing cloth does nothing, surgical 11% reduction but only among people over 50 and it still was neither statistically significant nor could be attributable to masks vs other factors.

Half the country doesn't care, they're forever stuck in their COVID jingoism, proud to tell people how righteous they are. So, enjoy those Freedom Fries, I mean masks!! I mean look at your response, like, "Oh no don't you dare say that 'there is no god' around here!!" It's just a faith-based issue at this point.

The study you have linked does not support the conclusion you’ve drawn from it. I would recommend reading the “Discussion” sections, where the authors discuss other studies in other areas of the world that contradict theirs, and the impact of various social and density factors on their specific study.

That study seems to have an obvious and unacknowledged flaw: they did not control for the growing prevalence of the delta variant this summer even though the time frame of the study exactly coincides with the spread of delta within the united states.

These sorts of analyses are extremely hard to control all confounds for.

What else do you call the performance of wearing your mask talking to the busboy and then taking it off after you are seated-inside a full restaurant.

Other performative examples would include permanent enclosed "outside" buildings complete with heating, AC and no airflow.

I think I know a ton of Covid-cautious people who "wear a mask" to restaurants by putting one on as they walk through the door and taking it off as they sit at their table. There are a lot of contexts where masks directly affect transmission, but it seems clear that they're also serving a symbolic role beyond their practical utility.

There are number of marginally useful anti-covid measures. A characteristic of the US public discourse is that some of these measures are ridiculous if not malevolent, while others are worth their weight in gold. The key of decoding which is which is the political beliefs of the reader.

masks: petty symbolism

ivermectin: horse dewormer

Do we think security theater is symbolism? It has had some positives over the years just as masks have a huge positive health impact during COVID but on both sides of the issue, people treat it as a signal as well, no?

Someone arguing in favor of security theater on HN. Brave.

It's not trolling just because you disagree with it.

Are you still not aware that there are serious people who believe that masks are basically irrelevant in a respiratory pandemic? Accusing others of trolling on this issue is not helpful. It was the consensus in Western medicine for 100 years. This consensus was forged after mask mandates were shown to be ineffective for Spanish Flu.

Here's what a Harvard epidemiologist has to say about the Bangladesh study:

"The Bangladesh mask study does not show a statistically significant difference in the efficacy of cloth masks vs surgical masks. Based on the confidence intervals, both could be around 0% or both could be around 20%."

https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/14355739027894640...

We killed 100x more people in Iraq with no evidence that their leadership was culpable.

Most people in 2021 would agree that the overzealous response to 9/11 caused untold suffering and misery. At the time though, either you were with us or against us. Good or evil.

Are you sure that's the parallel you want to be drawing here? Might you have a different opinion about this event in, oh, say, a decade or two? By then of course the damage will have been done.

They are pretty different things, at pretty different times. We could make bad analogies all day long and end up at some very weird places. Like imagine that COVID was invisible Arab terrorists armed with a gas who killed 600,000+ Americans. I think the response and fear level would be very different. But it's a silly analogy and a real digression from thinking about 9/11 in its own context.

Like covid, the actions of invisible terrorists would be largely out of our control. It's unfortunate so many of us are unwilling to accept that.

You mean, invisible Arab terrorists that are disarmed absurdly well by a vaccine. You see, this is exactly why it's a terrible analogy, because people will just twist it to suit their pre-conceived notions about the current divisive topic, bludgeon those they disagree with, and jump right back into the same damn arguments.

I thought we were reflecting on 9/11. COVID is such a bad analogy. FUCK, it's such a bad analogy.

Putting on cloth masks doesn't produce a statistically significant decrease in symptomatic infection rates.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

> This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.

What is it that you think you read in this article? What you have said is not supported in any way by the link you have provided.

> Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.

This means you can’t draw conclusions from this finding apart from that any difference there actually is is really small.

You can't draw conclusions from that study... yet that is exactly what you did in declaring masks to be ineffective.

What are you referring to? The top comment is not mine and also does not make that declaration, it correctly states that the difference is statistically insignificant.

The link you provided says the opposite of what you just said in the title.

Good thing better masks are available then.

If anything, this argues that we weren't strict enough on masks. Require not just wearing one, but a good one.

Wow, what a way to misrepresent that study.

The reduction in infection rates wasn't large enough to qualify as statistically significant. That just means that the reduction that they saw from cloth masks could have been due to chance.

Edit: Since the size of the cloth mask group is half the size of the surgical masl group, the effect in the cloth mask group would have to be comperatively larger than the effect on the surgical masl group to qualify as significant.

Somewhow you take that as evidence cloth masks don't work?

> After 9/11 the US was extraordinarily united and committed to vengeance. Thousands joined the military. After COVID we're more divided than ever and people are not even willing put a piece of cloth on their faces.

The govt reaction is similar. The populace has learned new lessons since 9/11.

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