https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...
It said that it can’t support an impact of cloth masks usage on infection rates, but associates them with reduced severity/symptoms.
That’s a notably distinct proposition from “no effect.”
What this should tell you is that "symptoms" are a bad endpoint for a randomized-controlled trial, not that if the good endpoint doesn't show you what you want, you should rely on the bad one.
They found a tiny effect in symptomatic seroprevalence at a single point in time.
First, the study conflates distancing and mask-wearing. They admit this in the paper (there is a significant increase in distancing amongst the mask wearers). There is also a large change in the size of the populations that could easily swamp the effect size (i.e. the size of the mask population was something like 9% bigger than the control).
Second, just because you observe effect size X at time T does not mean that you will see an equivalent effect at T+1. It also doesn't mean that you will see a compounding effect. In human terms: maybe you get a surge of behavior at the start of the intervention that doesn't continue, due to burnout or non-compliance. Or maybe you got lucky at time T, and randomly saw a population that yielded a result. You can't make the assumption.
No, you want to measure if an intervention works if you do everything reasonable to enact it. You don't get to invent an alternate reality where people are 100% compliant and there are chocolate rivers and gumdrop trees.
Otherwise, I have the perfect diet plan that will end all obesity, worldwide: don't eat if you're fat. Simple! If it fails, it's because you didn't follow my brilliant advice.
The point of these studies is to show people that the intervention works if people do it. And, yes, there are public policy studies showing that mask mandates don't work, but that doesn't mean they don't work for the people actually wearing them. It just means people who refuse are cutting their noses off to spite their faces. As noted in another comment, this isn't the beginning of the Third Reich, and should not be controversial at all.
If you show that a drug works in a petri dish, that's completely irrelevant if it's so toxic that people don't take it because of side-effects.
If you show that full-face respirators work on a mannequin in a box, that's completely irrelevant if real-world people don't wear full-face respirators because they suck.
> If you show that full-face respirators work on a mannequin in a box, that's completely irrelevant if real-world people don't wear full-face respirators because they suck.
And these examples are straw men. That's completely irrelevant to the point.