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Comment by mfcl | Hacker News Reader

That's not what I have been reading about the study. The evidence seems to be on the pro-mask side, but it does not appear to be _that_ clear. I'm not an expert in masks, health, or even statistics, so I'm not here to say you are right or wrong. I'm just pointing out that there is a debate. That itself is enough to want to look for more studies, don't you think?

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"?

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Have you looked at the study itself? From the abstract: “Mask distribution and promotion was a scalable and effective method to reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.”

The existence of “debate” doesn’t mean anything. Anti-maskers are always going to dispute studies like this, no matter how clear the evidence

Have you looked at the study itself? It found that cloth masks do nothing and surgical masks help a tiny bit. (control: 8.60%; treatment: = 7.63%) I suppose you could parse this as "masks work", I parse this as "if you are really worried about airborne virus, wear N95."

Page 12: "no statistically significant effect for cloth masks"

https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...

Page 12 paragraph for context:

"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."

> Have you looked at the study itself?

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."

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