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Comment by thrown_22 | Hacker News Reader

>. Waiting for strong, crystal-clear evidence to act would be engaging in the same flawed thinking that led to the claim that “there is no evidence that masks work” which we heard last year—the costs of delays or inaction would be high.

We are getting a real time test to the question of if mask mandates work in the wild: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-22/nz-jacinda-ardern-cov...

Australia has no mask mandates, NZ does. NZ has a higher death and hospitalization rate than Australia. The answer is that it's health theater on par with shoe removal at airports.

Of course we have the typical bait and switch of pretending that masks as used in an operation theater are in any way the same as the crumpled cloth mask from your pocket.

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I don't really know what you're talking about.

NZ looks to me to have a lower death rate than Australia. See [0].

I haven't done a deep dive of the literature but from what I understand wearing face masks is pretty well established to correlate with lower infection rates. A Google search gives [1] which seems pretty reputable to me.

It sounds like you're picking a fight about your personal cause celebre? The original article is talking about trying to figure out how to build evidence. The underlying assumption is that once you have evidence, you use it to inform decisions. You're pushing a false narrative by not only ignoring evidence but also misinterpreting or lying about the evidence that's available.

[0] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths&location=Austra...

[1] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/Documents/nCoV/CO...

He mentioned masks because the article itself uses masks as an example of a belief the author claims is false, as cited in the post above.

By the way, lots of people believe masks don't work. You can line up places that differ only by mask mandate status and observe that the case curves are the same. There are many situations like that, but in theory you only need one to disprove the claim that mask mandates (always) work. The case against masks is made by Ian Miller in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Unmasked-Global-Failure-COVID-Mandate...

>You're pushing a false narrative by not only ignoring evidence but also misinterpreting or lying about the evidence that's available.

In the past month Australia has not had a mask mandate, NZ has. NZ has had more than twice the per-capita deaths and hospitalization of Australia. If masks worked it should have been the reverse.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/new-zealand

I just don't see what you're talking about.

The same link but with Australia and New Zealand in every chart [0] just blatantly disproves your narrative.

I'm just not that familiar with the mask mandates of NZ and AUS. AUS looks to have lifted their mask mandate on June 17th 2022? Looking at the link you sent, to my eyes, there's a clear upward trend of deaths in AUS nearly three weeks after June 17th (June 10th 2022).

The numbers for both are so low, relative to other countries like the US, so it's kind of hard to really read too much into them but NZ looks at worst to be 20% more per capita than AUS.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/new-zealand?c...

The entire premise of the argument is flawed anyway. There are many factors for cases and hospitalizations / deaths. You can't cherry pick one comparison, at one point of time, and determine the attribution of one specific policy out of all the noise.

However, the only gold standard study done on cloth masks to my knowledge found no statistically significant benefit. If we are talking about cloth masks, I think we would have to accept that any benefit from them is very minimal at best.

Other types of masks like surgical or of course n95 do prove beneficial.

Now divide by population, 5 million for NZ, 25 million for Australia and 330 millions for the US.

Currently NZ has the equivalent of 2000 US deaths a day, Australia 1300 US deaths a day and the US has 500.

I see, you're looking at "Daily new confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people" which has a 7-day rolling average.

So, basically, during the last week or so, NZ had roughly 25 deaths per day whereas AUS had 50-70 per day in that week.

My apologies for not interpreting the data correctly.

The data still disproves your narrative. That one graph does have AUS at 2x NZ in a few key dates but overall no.

I'm going to stop arguing about this. I think the utility of further discussion has already diminished to the point of minimal reward.

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