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Comment by bedhead | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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