Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

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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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