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Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, the mask mandate ban appears to have precisely zero effect on the COVID situation in Florida, which has been steadily improving ever since schools opened. Here's a blog facetiously suggesting that not wearing masks in school caused the improvement, and while it's obviously written tongue in cheek, from a stats/causality point of view it's pretty much indistinguishable from a lot of arguments for masks.

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/09/10/science-opening...

For better or worse, while we know properly fitted N95s etc work, it's starting to look like "casual" mask wearing (fabric masks loosely worn and taken off regularly for eating etc) is mostly just pointless hygiene theater at this point.

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Theater, like security theater, is implementing something that doesn't work but doing it anyway for appearances. Masks work as you say. The fact that people don't want to wear them not is not hygiene theater, it's non-compliance.

More to your point, of course the mask ban had little effect in FL when it's on-again-off-again and challenged in courts. The situation is changing and confusing, so people will do what they want. The bigger factor is that covid is currently decreasing everywhere in the US as it has with previous waves.

Children in schools has never been a outsized contributor to covid numbers so school starting shouldn't be expected to have a major impact. (Children are getting covid in greater percentages because they are yet to be vaccinated.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-ar...

>The fact that people don't want to wear them not is not hygiene theater, it's non-compliance.

Cloth masks are Hygiene theater. The rules that allow cloth masks and neck gaiters and all sorts of stuff is all theater and are asking compliance for the sake of compliance.

N95/N99/k95 masks are not. These have effect.

Not wearing a mask at all, is non-compliance. But when the rules were changing (first it was don't wear a mask then changed to wear one), and when the rules about the masks aren't really protecting people by allowing cloth masks and gaiters, you're just giving those who already don't trust authorities in this matter more fuel for the fire.

>Children are getting covid in greater percentages because they are yet to be vaccinated.

And one wonders if that's a great idea

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

> The study suggests that the rate of CAE was 3.7 to 6.1 times higher among healthy 12-15-year-old boys than their risk of hospitalisation from Covid-19 in 120 days as of August 21. The rate of CAE was 2.6-4.3-fold higher at times of high weekly hospitalization risk, such as during January 2021.

> “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day Covid-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly Covid-19 hospitalization,” the study says.

>the COVID situation in Florida, which has been steadily improving ever since schools opened

There have been articles about how Florida recently switched to reporting deaths with the date of death, so it seems that it will continually appear that the rate plummeted recently. As time goes by, though, the graph will be filled in. Maybe people are being deceived by this.

>pointless hygiene theater at this point

You can be blasé about covid-19 and masks or not, you can be distrustful of all the random "experts" or not, but if you are, then it's "pointless theater" squared to spend time, money, and energy arguing, debating publicly, and fighting in court on exactly what we should do. It doesn't matter!

We're a year and half in at this point, and I've been masking throughout because I thought it would make a difference, plus I live in a country where it's compulsory anyway.

However, I've yet to see a peer-reviewed, statistically significant study about non-medical mask use in social settings having a measurable effect. If you have any pointers, I'm all ears.

I found this list of 40+. The second one seems to fit your criteria https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...

I remember reading that cloth masks may even be worse than no masks because while they stop large particles they also aerosolize the virus. They provide nearly no protection for the wearer. Don’t have the reference any more as I’ve long switched to surgical/FFP2, but this matches policy in central Europe.

Psychological harm caused by forcing mask on young children is well documented. So forcing something on them that has no positive effect matters a lot.

Citation needed. My anecdotal evidence of my four year old not giving a crap about wearing a mask disagrees with you.

More than an active shooter drill?

They've experienced greater psychological harm by having their parents and grandparents get COVID.

Basically the only place masks are a good idea is where the captive audience can't be vaccinated, which happens to be schools.

In the US somewhere around 50,000 children lost a parent or guardian. Couple of million lost a grandparent. I've known a higher than average number of people who lost a parent when they were children or teenagers. That's bad in a lot of different ways and has a life long impact. So I find people trivializing that to be gross and utterly appalling.

It is tragic but what this has to do with forcing kids to wear mask? Sweden hit zero COVID death months ago, even though they never closed elementary schools and did not require masks. Children bear an incredibly small health risk with respect to the virus. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics suggests “children continue to face a far greater risk of critical illness from influenza than from COVID-19. In addition, children are unlikely to spread the virus. The WHO’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, recently told the BBC that children appear to be “less capable” of spreading the virus than adults. In addition, the WHO has not observed any significant outbreaks that can be linked to regular school attendance.

Masks help prevent the flu as well, for the record.

Given quarantine policies for exposures the easiest way to keep kids in schools is to make sure the adults around them are vaccinated and that they take precautions before then.

My state effectively hit zero Covid deaths too a few months ago and that was through vaccination.

> In addition, children are unlikely to spread the virus.

That is something you have choose to believe.

Or not.

Epidemiologists and public health officials disagree with you on that.

They weren't trivializing losing a parent; they were trivializing wearing a mask by comparing it to losing a parent. Or a teacher, I guess.

China has already mandated N95s, even those with the valves that aren’t allowed in much of the west. The idea I think is that they are focusing filtering inbound while cloth masks only really filter outbound (so wearing the mask protect others, vs an N95 that has a higher chance of protecting the wearer).

Florida only reports their numbers once a week now and they aren’t breaking them down by county. They look good because they decided data reporting was no longer important: https://www.newsweek.com/florida-wont-release-number-covid-d...

I guess DeSantis is taking the ostrich approach? Let’s hope this is just incompetence and not willfully trying to obscure their data. All we really know is that they keep setting records, eg record number of deaths this week https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/news/2021/09/10/florida-...

Where did you hear that China has mandated N95 masks? I live in Beijing and I can't say I've seen anyone wearing one. We basically have to wear the normal surgical masks when in shops, on public transport etc.

I was browsing China daily the other day:

https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/202109/03/WS61397ce6498e6a1...

No cloth masks seem to be allowed.

Double masking also seems very effective: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7007e1.htm

Well, case numbers have been shaky through the entire pandemic to date. Hospitalisations and deaths are categorise though to get wrong though.

> China has already mandated N95s...

The part of China that the west should be copying is the "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat" approach of experimenting with policies to figure out which ones work in practice. Not the authoritarian systems underpinning the surveillance and control. More 1990 Hong Kong, less 2020 Hong Kong.

I’m not sure other stuff China does has to do with them mandating N95 masks because cloth masks are not effective enough? The parent comment makes the same observation, which isn’t invalidated by china’s authoritarian tendencies.

I can’t remember where I heard it, but some doctor was describing cloth and paper surgical mask effectiveness against Covid as “throwing a handful of sand at a chain link fence”.

N95 masks are supposed to be more like a wall. Except nobody really wears those as the cost about $2 each and you are only supposed to wear them for 3-4 days with proper sterilization between uses.

To my knowledge, Florida recently stopped reporting all hospitalizations of children due to COVID (either 0-17 or 0-18 ages)

So I don't think

> has been steadily improving ever since schools opened.

Is as truthful as one might think.

If you look at outbreak graphs in many countries, the shape of this Florida outbreak looks exactly like previous ones last year.

These outbreaks appear to be seasonal and come and go without vaccines (last year no one was vaccinated and the shape of the graphs was the same).

They also come and go without lockdowns. This is why the blog post encourages the reader (using satire) to find other mechanisms than Aquinas' prime mover theory.

Trends and scale are not the same. One would expect a similar trend line, especially with the volume of anti-vax in this country. The volumes are significantly lower.

> it's starting to look like "casual" mask wearing (fabric masks loosely worn and taken off regularly for eating etc) is mostly just pointless hygiene theater at this point.

No one has ever proven that mask mandates worked for covid, and it has been more than a year that we know that places which had a mask mandate didn't have a different trajectory that place that did, or that mask mandate didn't change the trajectory of the covid cases. So this is common knowledge at this point.

But the same way the market can stay irrational longer than you are solvable. A useless measure can stay in place longer that we know it has no effect

> and it has been more than a year that we know that places which had a mask mandate didn't have a different trajectory that place that did, or that mask mandate didn't change the trajectory of the covid cases

Anyone who doesn't believe this might want to take a look at https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

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