gildas
1yr ago
99.9% is probably closer to the truth than 99%. Even in Thailand (where I'm based) for most of the pandemic you saw virtually no one unmasked, even outside. The argument that not enough people wore them does not apply in Asia.
N95s might work if you have it professionally fitted, but given the number of healthcare workers that ended up catching COVID at work I doubt they're that effective either. I think we fundamentally don't understand how COVID spreads.
Our best guess is that COVID is essentially airborne, but being airborne is precisely why masks don't work. The aerosol just leaks out of any gaps between the mask and the face... or with cloth masks, probably directly through the mask itself. If COVID was spread by large droplets, like people coughing or sneezing on each other, then yes masks might have been effective. But given that there's no difference between places that wore them and places that didn't, it's pretty reasonable to say that they are not getting to the root of the problem.
Personally I think it's airborne so easily leaking out of masks, and that it's also infecting people via their eyes as much as their nose/mouth
Masking is one area where a lot of people seem to have lost their minds, or at least dropped their scientific reasoning over some sort of gut feeling.
As I said in a reply, the default position is that masks do nothing until proven otherwise. We have research dating back to 1919 that suggest they do in fact do nothing. They mandated them in Spanish Flu and found no difference in mortality anywhere. There have been many pandemics since 1919 - for example the nasty Asian flu of 1958 and Hong Kong flu of 1968. Masks were never recommended to the public for any of them, because the consensus was that they did nothing. When SARS hit in the early 2000s, not only were they not recommended but you could be fined in some countries up to $100,000 for trying to claim they did in order to sell them.
This all changed in 2020 - not because of any new evidence, but because people threw away all of the research in a fit of politicisation. I mean that literally too - websites which had articles dismissing masks based on the available evidence were pulled down because they "disagreed with the current climate". Even in 2020 it was fairly trivial to look at heavily masked countries vs unmasked countries and not see any real difference. Journalists liked to pick a specific country like Czechia and claim they beat COVID with masks, and then fell silent as Czechia became one of the worst countries in Europe for COVID mortality. This pattern happened a lot - barely any articles from 2020 stood the test of time.
Up until 2021 people liked to use Asia as "proof" that masks worked. Of course that has now fallen apart since then, as South Korea has shot up the rankings (along with Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong). All of those countries are 99%+ masked, and South Korea is actually fascinating as they had more cases per capita in the span of 2 months than the US has had during the entire pandemic - while fully masked, and with the majority of people wearing KN94s (i.e. much better than surgical or cloth masks).
Some like to claim N95s work (not based on any actual evidence as far as I can tell). Even assuming they did, they only work if they're professionally fit-tested to ensure there are no gaps, because even a tiny gap renders it totally useless. You can't filter air if it's not going through the filter. It's not feasible for an entire population to be fit-tested (especially not once per year as is required for professionals), and it's not at all realistic for people to be able to gauge it for themselves. Not to mention that everyone would have to shave off all of their facial hair and possibly remove piercings. And again, there's no real evidence that they work against COVID anyway. The huge numbers of medical staff that were off sick with COVID despite wearing N95s suggests they do not work against it. We don't even fully understand how COVID spreads - we believe it to be airborne, but for all we know it's infecting people via their eyes.
At this point I genuinely don't know how people still believe in them. There are no longer any cherrypicked countries people can point to to say "see masks worked here! but not the other places that wore them at the same level, because reasons!". We've had lot of opportunities for comparison - England after they dropped the mask mandates vs Scotland which kept enforcing them (Scotland performed worse), US counties which re-adopted masking while their neighbours didn't such as Alameda county vs Contra Costa (no difference), German provinces with mandated N95s vs the other provinces with surgical or cloth (no difference).
The claims have decayed from the lofty "if 50-80% of people wore masks, the pandemic would be over!" in summer 2020, to the current "they might make a slight difference, but don't trust the studies - trust my gut". The public-facing experts who pushed masks so strongly have turned out to be mostly quacks - people who suggested you wear panty liners on your face as a filter. People who thought scarves and t-shirts would be a suitable substitute. How many videos are there of politicians donning the mask for the cameras, and then removing it when the cameras were off? Even someone like Fauci didn't wear one at the airport. These people didn't actually believe in masks. It was a political policy, not a medical policy.
gildas
1yr ago
Not a great example given that South Korea is getting close to having the most COVID cases per capita in the world
Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan are all in the top 25 too
gildas
1yr ago
Combine that with the 'low adherence', and I continue to believe that 'wearing N95s rigorously probably reduces risk of respiratory illnesses' and 'rigorously wearing N95s may have been a good move during the pandemic if you're old/immunocompromised/etc'
The default scientific position is that they do nothing until proven otherwise. You can believe they work if you want, but there is no evidence that they do for something like COVID so it is very much a belief and not an evidence-based claim. Low adherence might be a factor in RCTs, but the majority of people in places like South Korea wear KF94s (with 99.9% of the population masked in public in some form) and they had more cases per capita in the span of two months than the US has had during the entire pandemic.
I don't understand why supposed "rationalists" cling to something with no evidence like this. Why do you think they weren't recommended prior to COVID? Masks are not a new invention. Hell, you could be fined $100,000 for claiming they would protect people from SARS because people knew how irresponsible it was to say that.
In Thailand I'd say it's about 60% surgical mask, 40% KF94s or similar. I think Korea's ratio is the other way around
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