A colleague of mine got sick of COVID last January while he did everything by the book (masks, gel, distancing etc).
So the effectiveness of masks is probably marginal IMHO.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but maybe this demonstrates the flaws in a lot of our casual reasoning about public health measures.
It's not a silver bullet, of course, and there are some situations were masks will be useless: for example, when you get in a closed room with no ventilation with other people for a long time, masks won't do too much. Or if you get together to have dinner with others and take your mask off, well, they won't do much obviously. But masks are effective, and a pretty low cost intervention to reduce the incidence. That's a fact.
> Although the difference observed was not statistically significant
I'm not sure I understand your objection, but you most definitely can say there was no statistically significant benefit.
Yes, but this study also doesn't point too conclusively that they don't have any effect. If the CI was something like 1% increase in infections - 1% decrease, you could say with a lot of confidence that it doesn't seem that masks did anything at all. But -23% to 46% is a gigantic range to say anything at all about effectiveness. So while this study is, as you say, not supporting the hypothesis that masks are effective, it doesn't support either the hypothesis that masks are not effective.
That isn't to say we should ignore all other studies, but the body of literature on mask effectiveness is very split. Maybe masks do work, I wouldn't be surprised if that were true, but given the body of evidence I'm of the opinion if they do work their effect is marginal.
It very clearly doesn't. No support for "masks are effective" is not the same that "support for masks are ineffective". To put an extreme example, suppose I make an study with just two participants, one with mask and another one without, and neither of them get infected. The results wouldn't support the hypothesis that masks are effective, but neither could support the hypothesis that masks are ineffective. Which is the point: the study you linked to does not have enough power to actually check effectiveness of the measure. The 95% confidence interval is way too large to draw any conclusion.
Another issue for the study is that it's evaluating surgical masks, which are less effective than N95 masks, and only for infection of the wearer, when we know they're much more effective at avoiding others from getting infected.
That's why population-level studies are important, and you'll find that those support the effectiveness of masks.
Surgical masks are thought to have a relatively limited benefit for the wearer, so this isn't surprising. However, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y demonstrates clearly that in a randomized controlled trial where surgical masks are distributed to a whole community, there was a statistically significant reduction in cases:
"The decrease was a modest 9%, but the researchers suggest that the true risk reduction is probably much greater, in part because they did no SARS-CoV-2 testing of people without symptoms or whose symptoms did not meet the World Health Organization’s definition of the disease."
There's certainly more to learn here, of course.
Why is there no good statistics over breakthrough infections, not merely how many double vaccinated are in hospital? Why not blast the non-immunity provided by supposed vaccine the same way as "infections per day" is shown everywhere?
Show "failure of vaccine to provide immunity cases per day"
Ouch. Anecdotes like this really scare me. I also have friends with double Pfizer shots who got the COVID and had strong symptoms.
Maybe Pfizer should go back to the drawing board though.
Though I assume, without the vaccine they would have probably ended up in the hospital. Glad I got my 3rd dose now.
> Maybe Pfizer should go back to the drawing board.
Maybe we should look at the data and see that the vaccines are still pretty effective. Think about the difference in restrictions and people behavior between now and before the vaccines: they have pretty much enabled normal life again and made COVID a much less worrying disease, even with high case numbers again.
The vaccines (on the U.S. market, at least) were never promoted as providing complete protection from Covid. It was about preventing serious illness and keeping people out of the hospital. As others have pointed out, they have been largely successful in those goals.
I'm not claiming the vaccines are perfect, but I think a large part of the population was under the impression that these vaccines were some sort of silver bullet that would end the virus in a few short months.
edit: spelling
Then do not call it a vaccine, because it is not.
I did not take my TBE vaccine, to be greeted a year later by TBE.
Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or ameliorate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer). Some vaccines offer full sterilizing immunity, in which infection is prevented completely.
The key word up there is "ameliorate," which is exactly what the Covid vaccines available in United States promise to do.
Notice anything in particular? While yes, the definition has changed.
Keep in mind that the person you are replying to is here to tell the tale. It is unclear what the vaccine did or did not do but if I was in their shoes I would certainly be glad that I wasn’t facing that infection unvaccinated. That could very well have been the difference between severe and deadly COVID. The effectiveness numbers have been always quoted as against severe illness but I would much prefer to focus on effectiveness against hospitalization and death. It seems that all three vaccines authorized/approved in the US are effective against these two outcomes, more so than merely protecting against a severe case.
Also keep in mind that what a random stranger describes on the internet as “severe” could mean a variety of things. I have had some severe colds. I haven’t had one since the pandemic started due to social distancing and masks. Don’t panic. Get your shots (booster included) and keep an eye on the data.
That’s not quite how vaccine efficacy works. Suppose the risk of getting sick is 0.5% per thousand person hours when unvaccinated. A 90% vaccine efficacy means that the risk of getting sick is reduced to 0.05% per thousand person hours, not that 10% of people who get vaccinated are still vulnerable.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/vaccine...
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/pandemic-data-initiative/data-ou...
I was thinking why one would say this without mentioning that the vaccination rate is pretty high, so one would expect more breakthrough cases than cases in unvaccinated people. For an extreme example, with 100% vaccination rate, all cases would be breakthrough. I can't find the UK data, so can't answer exactly, but not unexpected at all.
> Alex Berenson
And this explains why you didn't include it. I didn't know this person, but apparently he's a writer, no education in stats/biology/medicine, from the US, and apparently has made multitude of wrong claims [1]. I wonder if it's that you don't know better or you're making a bad faith argument.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
Does that really need to be stated? I don't think even the most suspicious among us think the vaccines make a person more likely to catch Covid all else being equal. It seems more a commentary on the narrative (not promulgated by you, but it is out there) that vaccines+distancing will somehow be able to eliminate the novel coronavirus entirely.
To be honest, the only times I've seen this narrative is when people say it's out there and argue against it. I've never seen it seriously supported.
Age is still a significant factor of infection chance and disease severity/outcome.
If older people are more likely to be vaccinated than younger people then it skews to more breakthroughs. You can even get a simpson's paradox where people were seeing higher fatalities in overall vaccinated vs unvaccinated but is not true when you controlled for age.
And these days one would probably also have to consider time since last vaccination since antibody titer wanes with time which is likely important.
Do we know if Europe actually has stricter mask mandates (that are observed) and more mask wearing, like you seem to be suggesting? Because based on my casual observation I'd say no.
The entire package of measures that bring viral prevalence to zero are well established, and have been implemented in several countries. They include:
* Initial lockdowns to drive incidence down to near-zero.
* After reopening, strict quarantine for people arriving from regions where the virus is circulating.
* Thorough contact tracing, and the ability to quarantine people who come into close contact with infected people.
* Temporary restrictive measures (like stopping mass gatherings) during new outbreaks.
* The ability to rapidly test large populations during an outbreak, in order to quickly identify and isolate infected people and quarantine their contacts.
This is an entire system aimed at keeping viral prevalence at zero over the long term. It actually allows most of society to function normally most of the time, because as long as there is zero prevalence, everyone can go about their lives normally.
> So the effectiveness of masks is probably marginal IMHO.
Non-sequitur.