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Comment by oneshtein | Hacker News Reader

It's easy: masks helps to avoid infection or/and buys more time for body to fight a virus. Looking at graphs of mortality rate between countries with good mask culture and bad mask culture, it looks like masks reduced Covid19 mortality by 2x at least.

  Country   # of cases   # of deaths
  USA       111,820,082  1,219,487
  UK         24,910,387    232,112
  Japan      33,803,572     74,694
  S. Korea   34,571,873     35,934

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Is it not more likely the # of deaths are related to obesity for example, where US has 5-7 times as many obese as Japan for example. Which matches the % deaths statistic you have there quite well.

In other words: it's not easy. There are many factors at play.

I discounted 10x to 2x, or 20% of the effect.

Others have already pointed that mortality rates do not reveal the full picture. There are various factors that affect the mortality rates in different countries – masks being only one of those factors. There are more critical factors at play such as age, obesity, co-morbidities, access to affordable health care, etc.

While masks are shown to slow the spread of infection, ultimately the larger problem with handling the COVID-19 pandemic was the lockdowns and isolation. Lockdowns and isolating individuals definitely helped reduce the spread of the infection and probably saved a lot of lives but prolonged isolation actually reduced the overall immunity in our population. Human immune systems require constant exposure to all sorts of germs to keep it humming along. Isolation does the exact opposite and while it is useful in the short term, prolonged 'clean room' type conditions created due to isolation and lockdowns are harmful.

That's of course wayyy oversimplified. There are many more differences between those places than just masking culture. You can't come to a conclusion without evaluating all the other factors.

This is exactly the kind of pseudoscience argument people pull in that muddies the water (on both sides of the debate)

This is not a scientific argument (correlation is not causation), but it's an argument supported by numbers, not just words.

If we look at scientific studies, they also confirm the some effectiveness of masks in reducing the risk of influenza or COVID-19 infection and mortality.

One study on mice, I saw, showed that antiviral-coated masks increase the likelihood of developing immunity to infection BEFORE the infection, because fragments of dead viruses enter the lungs and trigger an immune reaction.

Yeah I'm not saying that masks don't help. Just that these numbers don't prove that. There's so many more cultural and medical differences.

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