That "one study in Bengladesh with masks" involved 342,183 participants and produced clear evidence that masks work. What is the point of more studies if folks are just going to dismiss them out of hand?
I find it both dreary and frustrating, personally, and it's not terribly surprising that people like the poster above call people out on it.
The question is, what do we do about it? Posting even worse comments, like the GP, is obviously not helping.
You could, of course, say the same thing about personal attacks: They're endemic on the internet and to humanity, but we've mainly kept them out of HN using the above measures.
Lazy dismissal is often the top comment on any given post, COVID or not. It's harmful to discussion and I would argue antithetical to the hacker spirit: If we only allow perfect airtight products/proofs, we miss out on discovery and exploration. Perhaps some guideline to avoid lazy dismissals (or something along those lines) would go a long way.
I keep looking, and I find it kind of incredible that we're two years into a pandemic, and except for one study in Bangladesh with masks (that wasn't really that clear) - there is nothing to say that any of these masks are working.
Was what was seen as a lazy dismissal. I should have spent more time expanding on why I didn't think it was really clear, but the point I was really trying to get at - is that there has been a lack of experimentation, trials, research - despite the millions of lives lost and many billions of dollars spent (Trillions?) - and I was really hoping someone would respond with a pointer to such a RCT that we could all read.
Unfortunately the takeaway wasn't that we should spending more time to demonstrate that masks work, but that I was dismissing that they did. The absolute opposite of what I was attempting to do. The failure in communication is clearly mine, and I'll try and be a little more expansive in the future.
For the record, what I really should have written was,
"To date, there have been no studies that have reassured me that I could go indoors into a crowd of infected, unmasked people, confident that as long as I kept my well-fit 3M 8210 N95 mask on, that I ran < 0.1% chance of being infected by Covid. The Bangladesh Study that showed 8.6% of people in the control villages reporting Covid symptoms and 7.6% in the experimental villages, did not provide me that kind of reassurance, thought I think it provided statistically significant results that masks as a general public health NPI are effective at reducing transmission of the Coronaviruses under study at the time."
Of course - Omicron essentially reset all expectations for transmissibility.
I have never, not once in 18+ months gone indoors where other people are, without wearing an N95 Mask (after I was able to source them ~ June 2020).
I don't think it's an exaggeration that a lot of the last two years of my life have been dedicated to both encouraging (strongly) everyone I know to wear a high-quality, well-tested N95 from a well-known trusted source, as well as scouring the internet for solid research on the effectiveness of masks.
I'm not lazily dismissing that Bangladesh study - I just came away from it not being particularly encouraged that it provided evidence that the masks / methodology presented there would shut down a pandemic by preventing transmission. I'm eagerly and enthusiastically looking for evidence to confirm my bias that masks work.
Plus, they had to throw out 26 villages with 0 infections in order to get that much of an effect. Now there is a certain logic to that, but I wager that if most of those 26 villages had been ones with the intervention, they would not have thrown them out; I'm not aware of that part of the analysis being pre-registered.
They probably don't have a non-zero impact, but it appears to be pretty small, even with a massive intervention like the one in Bangladesh.
Ben Recht at UC Berkeley has several good blog posts on this issue: https://www.argmin.net/2021/12/01/unblinding/
In much the same way that not masking was recommended early in the pandemic as a public health initiative to reserve the masks for first responders - wasn't particularly good advice for the individual.
If masking helps everyone, then you should do it, even if it somehow magically didn't help you.
Likewise, the current guidance that wearing masks - particularly if they are well fit FFP3/99%+ filtering, is good advice globally, but it’s unclear if it’s sufficient to reduce the risk down to <.1% for the individual (the point at which I would pretty much not worry about social distancing and avoiding stores, workplace, etc… I’m <65 and vaccinated, So I would be comfortable with a 1/1000 risk of catching Covid, particularly as I can usually avoid those scenarios)
The question isn’t whether masks are an important NPI - they absolutely are - particularly if we could convince people to avoid going indoors unmasked and ensuring they are wearing (and not taking off) well fit FFP3s, the question is whether that is sufficient to mostly eliminate the risk of catching Covid.
One lesson I learned here is that you really need to expand on your thoughts and not assume everyone else is already on the same wavelength as yourself.
To answer your question, the point of more studies is to increase confidence in our opinions and decisions, make better findings, realize errors, etc. And you are quickly jumping to conclusions with "folks like you are just going to dismiss them out of hand".
Now, my question would be: what do you mean by "folks like you"?
The existence of “debate” doesn’t mean anything. Anti-maskers are always going to dispute studies like this, no matter how clear the evidence
Page 12: "no statistically significant effect for cloth masks"
https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...
"We find clear evidence that the intervention reduced symptoms: we estimate a reduction of 11.6% (aPR = 0.88 [0.83,0.93]; control: 8.60%; treatment: = 7.63%). Additionally, when we look separately by cloth and surgical masks, we find that the intervention led to a reduction in COVID-like symptoms under either mask type (p = 0.000 for surgical, p = 0.066 for cloth), but the effect size in surgical mask villages was 30-80% larger depending on the specification. In Table S9, we run the same specifications using the smaller sample used in our symptomatic seroprevalence regression (i.e. those who consented to give blood). In this sample we continue to find an effect overall and an effect for surgical masks, but see no statistically significant effect for cloth masks."
Please don’t do this here. This is against the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."