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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way.

For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture".

And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

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No, masks just help. Masks are so helpful that medical workers all need masks before the general public gets any. I am being completely sincere here.

After medical workers, cashiers, delivery people & others who must be in contact with the public have plenty of appropriate personal protective equipment, then the only way to restart the economy may be to spread that equipment to people in other lines of work.

Well, for one, it's insane to say "masks don't help" in the same phrase where you say "we need them for the medical staff". Which one is it?

I think the key phrase in that tweet was "general public". Medical professionals who are in close contact for many hours of the day, day after day, do not count as general public.

That is absolutely true. Still, if masks are necessary for medical professionals, it's ridiculous to say they don't help anyone else at all. And yet, that's what our government is saying.

I totally agree that this is nothing more than correlation at this point. I'm all for a double-blind study and would love to better quantify mask-wearing. I am saying: wearing masks seems like an easy thing to do that could potentially limit the COVID-19 infection rate.

That's nonsense. How are you going to blind people to whether they're wearing a mask or not? There's already a lot of evidence supporting the use of mask to protect the wearer and to protect transmission of infection from the wearer ("source control") both in healthcare and in community settings.

We wrote a sort of mini-review on this recently: https://medium.com/@matthiassamwald/promoting-simple-do-it-y...

And it could also give people a false sense of security. Masks may be helpful, but only in concert with other practices. Distancing is going to have a much larger impact on limiting the viral spread. If you have a bunch of people wearing masks that are only partially effective start gathering in large groups, you run the risk of negating all of the good generated from distancing.

The "false sense of security" point needs evidence the same way that we need evidence on whether masks are beneficial or not. There's evidence for the latter, and, to the best of my knowledge, only speculation on the former point.

Either way, no one is advocating for mask wearing to replace other mitigation measures.

Social distancing itself doesn't work. When I go to a shop, I always see people without masks, or even having masks but not using them properly (it's supposed to be on the mouth, not on the chin). They are the people who just don't care if they kill other people by chance, even thought the radio is talking about the seriousness of coronavirus all the time in the shop.

I always use a P100 full face mask when shopping, because I have respiratiory illness and scared of getting sick and breathing even harder than I can right now.

They admit they don't have any evidence: "We need hard data that show a direct effect of a strong mask-wearing culture to lower COVID-19 virality. We only have antidotal research at this point."

But nevertheless "The West needs to adopt mask culture"

When you have a correlation plus a plausible mechanism for causation, it's not appropriate to invoke "correlation is not causation". It's literally true, but distracting. That's where you do additional studies.

And both have situation under control compared to Italy or Spain. Even if they're literally next door to China and were exposed much earlier.

> And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

This seems an odd way to summarize your point. SK and Japan didn't do lockdowns, and yet fared better than any country that did.

My point is not about the effectiveness of lockdowns. Its about the effectiveness of masks. All 3 of those countries used masks, and I would guess China's use shot up to high once things started exploding. Based on infection numbers its not clear that masks actually had impact.

Watch Tokyo closely over the next few days and weeks. History isn’t written yet.

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