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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I was inclined to agree circa April 2020, but I think that we've since run massive natural experiments and found out that masks basically don't matter to any meaningful extent, short of wearing tight fitting respirators. Every time I see someone still wearing a cloth mask, I wonder at just how bad their information diet is.

Anecdote. But Dragoncon last year had a mask policy. Pretty much nobody got Covid. This year they tried a mask policy but it failed because the hotels were not under control of the con and didn't also have a mask policy. Lots of people got Covid.

What does this add to the conversation?

It's an example of masks preventing Covid.

I specifically want sick people to wear masks, masks do block particulate matter from coughs and the like. I don't wanna dig up the mask horse but i don't recall reading anything that said "masks don't work, throw em out", just various things about masks middling efficacy at stopping covid. All the masking and social distancing meanwhile basically ended the flu for a few years, i feel like theres something to be gleaned from that and it isn't "fuck masks" imo.

You'd need to look at a country that never saw adoption of masks to confirm that masks were the culprit. Sweden is basically the only country I can think of to avoid mass masking, either cultural or legally enforced. They seem to also report no influenza season: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publikationer-och-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-season-2020-2021/?pub=99545

i shouldn't have used the flu thing to support my point that masks help reduce the spread of diseases from coughs. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72798-7 this study supports my point, what you got that says masks dont stop the particles from coughs?

wearing a surgical mask or a KN95 respirator significantly reduced the outward number of particles emitted per second of breathing.

note that i never defended cloth masks, and they do seem worthless at best.

Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.

Weird how masks destroyed the flu and yet all the pre-COVID studies showed poor results for masking against influenza. Or how Asian countries with cultures of mask-wearing pre-COVID did not "destroy the flu". I wonder if there were other things going on in 2020 that were not going on in other years.

none of that means that masks are a bad prophylactic for generally slowing down the spread of respiratory infections that spread by coughing.

Even assuming that people actually cough into their well sealed "KN95 respirator" (eww), what proof do we have that those respiratory infections actually spread by coughing and the relatively larger sized particles?

eww? my friend, when someone coughs on the bus its eww for everyone, my point is that the person who is coughing should have as much of the cough localized to them as possible. yes eww, but it's the guy who's coughing thats gross to begin with.

What are you asking for here, studies that show that the particulate from coughs can contain viruses? That you can catch a cold by being coughed on?

im not saying that if we adopted voluntary masking at 100% uptake the cold would be gone, im saying that i bet it would reduce the spread of cough-transmitted sickness.

Then why the complete lack of studies showing that before 2020?

i that the case? Heres one from 2010 https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/201/4/491/861190

We observed significant reductions in ILI during weeks 4–6 in the mask and hand hygiene group

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