Edit: it seems the best case scenario in the article is that these outbreaks were always there, and we are better seeing them? Do we expect that to hold up? Or will we start ignoring it again?
Public health people talking about low incidence of diseases being due to pandemic isolation and masking almost certainly weren't implying that they were gone, more commenting that they were suppressed by those changes to behavior.
I am kind of fascinated that there is so little call to do things like improve ventilation. There's some, but people haven't seemed to catch on that we could do things to reduce disease that cause ~no individual inconvenience. Or like send people home when they come to work with a cold, change that culture.
For outbreaks, I doubt a few hundred cases of monkeypox (outside of the endemic areas) would have been such major news a couple years ago. It's largely an attention phenomenon. It is certainly something to keep an eye on, but it doesn't appear to be spreading uncontrollably. Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the endemic areas, has more cases this year than the non-endemic areas.
Some countries are actually putting significant resources into this. But if you're in a country that isn't, well, realistically, who is going to pay for it? Public health experts pretty much everywhere are saying that it should be done (mind you, they were saying that before covid, too; "proper ventilation would be beneficial" is hardly a new idea), but the only way it happens is through state funding.
Is it really that expensive to open a window?
I remember even in the dead of winter our school would regularly open windows to let in some fresh air. And in the hot humid summers we would regularly keep open windows, no matter how hot it got outside, 25 kids inside would make it way hotter. And smellier.
Then the discussion can be about a more specific cost (and time) estimate and include better information about the changes the updates would bring about.
Or we could just assume it is too expensive and inconvenient to be worth looking into.
Increased ventilation even helps with concentrating in school, as high CO2 is not good for schooling. I used to fall asleep all the time while I was in school, elementary, secondary, university, even staring at a computer. Now that I work from home, I never fall asleep that way. I was clearly just so tired from high CO2.
I thought that Mass was just boring in elementary school. Perhaps there was more to it than that!
I can't even really say they are wrong. I don't know. My weight would be more on our 90%ish percent vaccination rate, but I could see both having impact.
Edit: I'm actually somewhat skeptical that ventilation will work as well as folks hope. Living in a place that largely does rely on outside air, we had just as large of outbreaks as anyone else. (That is, it is common to have open windows here. The kid's schools are even made to take advantage of that, if I understand it correctly.) Again, I am /not/ saying it is wrong. I just doubt it weighs as heavily as portrayed.
Of course better ventilation won't outright stop diseases from spreading, the point is that it will reduce the spread with reasonable cost and little downside (like another commenter mentions, if the existing ventilation isn't keeping up with CO2 concentrations, there can be other benefits).
I should note I'm not against trying. It seems a low hanging fruit to reach for. Just, evidence has shown that this particular disease goes for saturation fairly effectively.
It's an airborne disease. Better aeration definitely helps with airborne diseases, multiple studies prove it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17257148/
But of course, COVID spreads so easily that this can reach the limit (especially Omicron) and in an environment where kids will interact together in all kind of ways, but this would have definitely helped a lot more in the first few waves (pre-omicron) without needing to shut down schools entirely.
I'm confused on the particular study you picked. The main claim for positive evidence "supports the use of negatively pressurized isolation rooms for patients with these diseases in hospitals" but it goes on to basically acknowledge we still need more information in larger environments. Specifically, in the abstract, "However, the lack of sufficient data on the specification and quantification of the minimum ventilation requirements in hospitals, schools and offices in relation to the spread of airborne infectious diseases, suggest the existence of a knowledge gap."
I'm all for more studies. And, again, I expect and hope we learn more.
Any chance you know of where to look for that data?
I'm sure the CCP is saying that about lockdowns right now.
Don't forget that fabric masks were found to be only marginally effective, and surgical masks are only somewhat effective. At this point, if you're in a mask, it should be at least N95 or don't bother. I'm still amused when I see people diligent about using masks, but not concerned enough to use an N95.
My realization during this has been that it couldn't be stopped, it could only be delayed. As soon as you roll back restrictions, it will resume spreading until ~everyone has immunity. There will always be jurisdictions that don't care as much, so no amount of hard lockdowns work unless you can seal your border. There was never a window where we could eradicate it with vaccines because delta was already circulating by the time vaccine distribution had ramped up in April, 2021.
There's a slight chance the omicron mRNA vaccines will have sterilizing immunity as good as the original vaccines and the original variant, but there's no reason to think a new variant won't evade the new vaccine.
> And that if we are diligent in the future, we wouldn't have as severe of outbreaks.
If you're willing to do continue restrictions indefinitely, sure.
People still think SARS-CoV-2 spreads by droplets, so in their minds things like that wouldn't do anything.
It's technically true if every single person on Earth did this at the same time.
Which is impossible, so no.
Mask was not meant to "eradicate" anything, that was not the intent. The same thing with lockdowns, it was not meant to eradicate anything.
The original intent back in the very early stage of the pandemic is to slow down the pace of hospitalizations (or as they market it, flatting the curve); the best way to do that is to slow down the number of people getting sick. What were the best solutions?
1. Be vigilant with cleaning up and avoiding contact with sick folks (self)
2. Stay home if you're sick, wear masks and so on. (self)
3. Lock down when it was getting out of control. (community)
Also, this can have an impact on reducing the variants by having less hosts to infect and to mutate but this failed, so we're likely to stick with COVID for a very long time like the cold and flu.
People should still be masking up if they're sick and can't stay home.
This is a claim that is novel to me.
Masks help limit transmission. The immediate benefit is likely reducing transmission between an interaction of random people. A secondary, less supported benefit, is the reduction of viral load in transmissions - which can help reduce severity of an infection.
This is not shocking when you consider the fact that surgeons have worn masks for a long time - with nearly the sole intention of reducing infection in their patients (albeit, not necessarily airborne infections).
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IMO, people should be more outraged that the gov't did seemingly little to actually increase the healthcare's system to accommodate COVID patients. My understanding is mask mandates were almost always tied to significant capacity restrictions in the healthcare system. The idea of wearing masks was to create a buffer for healthcare to catch up.
The mask mandates implemented in most places were always pointless pandemic theater. Only a properly fitted (i.e. tightly sealed with no facial hair) N95 or equivalent does much to block transmission of a highly contagious respiratory virus. It was never realistic to get the general public to do that.
Sorry, who "seems to think this?". I haven't seen this claim, or anything like it, anywhere.
The point many were making was that the overwhelmingly successful suppression of all these other diseases was clear proof that "masks work" to suppress disease, and by extension that we should wear them to effect the suppression of a much more dangerous pandemic. So when there's a largely uncontrolled pandemic happening, you should wear a mask.
Now, general immunity seems to have reached a point where the pandemic is at least reasonably controlled without mitigation strategies. Covid of mid-2022 is now a worrisome endemic disease, comparable to (but yet rather more dangerous than) the worst flu seasons we've seen in the past century (since 1918).
So... we can take our masks off now (most of us, admitting that some people have different levels of risk tolerance, etc...). The calculus changes because the facts on the ground have changed.
None of that is an argument that you shouldn't have worn a mask in late 2020. You absolutely should have, and it remains horrifying to me that so many of us didn't.
And homeschool isn't really an answer here, sadly. It is fairly well documented that kids that come out of homeschool and finally enter a workforce or other social environment are at a heightened risk of sicknesses that the general populace just doesn't notice.
Edit: I hasten to add that I agree this is not an argument that masks don't work. And I don't understand why some folks still insist on fighting not to wear them.
It's undeniably clear that wearing actual respirator N95 or ffp2 masks that are fit to the face work in preventing infection and spread. That's just physics. But when most are only wearing a partial covering "mask" that just blocks spittle of course it's not going to prevent infecting or infection by an aerosol spread disease.
The real problem with "masks" was that our governments' intentionally lied about the need for them at the start of the pandemic. The messaging never recovered from this and I imagine even if government health institutions stated the truth today, that face fit respirators are required, it'd just be ignored. The problem wasn't ever actual masks, it was people lying about them and people not wearing them.
Sure, unfit "masks" might have some mitigation potential and it's better than wearing nothing. But masks, in the context of an aerosol spread infection, have to mean fit respirator masks.
But, again, I am /not/ arguing against masks. I fully agree that if you are sick, stay home and wear a mask when you do go out. My point is that much of the reduction is more easily explained with "stay home" than it was "a lot of folks were wearing masks." I further agree that both had an likely had an impact. But, just as having a more streamlined car will give you better gas mileage, if you are trying to make a bigger impact, you are almost certainly better focusing on buses than you are personal vehicles.
It is? I mean, something worked. You think the fact that flu deaths dropped to essentially zero for two years was exclusively due to school closures? Is there any evidence for that?
I'll admit to some individual dithering on the evidence for any given mitigation strategy. But clearly, on the whole, societal mitigations for covid worked very well to control disease. You admit that much, right? People freaked out about school closures too. They freaked out about distancing. They freaked out about travel restrictions. (also covid-specific rules like testing requirements, and vaccination programs). And it was, overall, the same people arguing against all this stuff that was, again, clearly working as evidenced by its effect on influenza and et. al.
So why did people argue so hard against exactly those (working!) mitigation strategies?
More likely due to nursing home closures I would think.
Clearly what we did worked vs. the flu. So arguments that "what we did" was not effective vs. covid seem prima facie wrong. Right?
It's OK to argue at the margins about what the most effective strategies were, and I'm happy to engage on that. But almost everywhere I see this argument, it seems more like an attempt to paper over a historical refusal to accommodate any mitigation at all.
I admit that it's possible that something worked, but I don't even think that's a given. We don't know how covid and influenza interact, and perhaps covid is outcompeting it. I'm not at all a virologist and have only a vague understanding that this hypothesis exists, but just throwing it out there to say I'm not 100% convinced that something we did worked.
> So, is it so weird to assume that the most obvious hypothesis (general social distancing and mask use) is correct?
This is just begging the question. Why is mask use the most obvious hypothesis? To me the most obvious hypothesis is that by closing nursing homes to outside visitors we shut off the main vector by which new influenza infections enter the facilities.
And again, this is just both of us guessing, because we don't have data.
I cannot underscore enough just how sick families get by having their kids in schools.
To your last point? I got nothing. At large, we were trying to make a bad situation better. The vehement arguing and digging in on not doing anything seems like it is really only going to make things worse.
I will also throw under the bus that it was a single thing that worked. Even my "I think it was largely the school closures" is banking that it is one of the largest factors, but I don't think it was large enough that it alone could accomplish what we did see.
Countries and states with strict mask policies did not do better than those without these policies (see US States for an example).
So do mask work?
It is like a religious belief system, you would get the same reaction when questioning if God existed and asked parishioners and atheists. Everything is evidence for those that want to believe.
Studies that claim to "prove" that masks work turn out to be shambolic messes - yet are published in the most selective of journals, see for example:
Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance.
There is your answer.
Studies that claim to "prove" that masks work turn out to be shambolic messes
Do you have a list of the 10 or 20 studies on high filtration masks that you found to be better than the others that you evaluated?
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4118566
> We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval. Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables.
If you look at the plot - there were more cases when masks were required!
It's weird that people arguing against masking as a policy intervention go after the masks rather than the obvious problem, which is compliance. When someone tells you that you have to have a mask on to be in a building and then pulls their mask under their nose (happened to me last week), the effectiveness of masking isn't being evaluated, it's the effectiveness of masking as a policy intervention that is being evaluated.
Read the paper. There were more cases per student when masks were required.
Look at the paper and their plot when they talk about cases overall.
We do not understand what masks do and what people do when masked with these silly measures. Putting on and off a mask cannot be good for you.
The mask proponents "think" simplistically and that it "ought" to work. "Logically it MUST work.
There is no such thing "I know it works", so no need to do it. Anything we "know" is because we ran solid tests and collected clear cut evidences many many times. None of which are true for masks.