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Comment by lixtra | Hacker News Reader

To summarize the paper:

The authors compute a sophisticated average of German cities and compare the weighted number of positive SARS-CoV-2 tests to the city of Jena for a timespan of one month starting just before masks became obligatory there (6th April). Masks did not become obligatory elsewhere and roughly around the mask obligation new positive cases drastically reduced in Jena whereas the weighted average shows no such effect.

EDIT: moved my doubts in the study into extra comment.

If you think the summary is wrong, please leave a comment pointing out in which way, after downvoting.

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>> Masks did not become obligatory elsewhere

I have to challenge this assessment from the article. Masks did become mandatory elsewhere. Mostly in targeted spots in the cities such as the zeil in Frankfurt and Potsdamer platz in Berlin and I can tell you that it is met with strict enforcement and that people are adhering to the rule ardently with very few exceptions. The article and much of the science leaves much to be desired.

It is my opinion that the “all or nothing” pro mask people are actually obstructing the science. Their intolerance to confront or question evidence that is contradictory or unexplained anomalies in the data such as this article is dangerous to actually having the right response to covid leads to nonsensical draconian rules like the California mayor suggesting requiring wearing a mask 24 hours a day and only removing between bites when eating.

The study period is end of March to end of April. Masks in the Frankfurt pedestrian zone became obligatory in October [1]. I will amend my summary.

[1] https://www.msn.com/de-de/nachrichten/panorama/ab-freitag-ma...

Since I seem to get downvoted for adding doubt to the paper in my comment, I move it here:

The study does not look into other east German cities like Weimar[1] or Rostock that showed a similar drop in positive tests without mask obligations. New positive tests in Jena recently reached an all time high. [2]

[1] https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20weimar/

[2] https://www.corona-in-zahlen.de/landkreise/sk%20jena/

Thanks for the summary, this confirms what I already suspected, which is that these kinds of studies are pretty much useless to correlate anything with anything.

On top of that it seems the study hypotheses for these papers are clearly biased towards proving a positive correlation between infections and mask use, even though one could do exactly the same kind of study in many other parts of the world where infections exploded along with increasingly expansive mask mandates. For example France and Spain, where numbers only started to go down after they went into second lockdown.

No matter what you think of mask effectiveness, cherry picking statistics is bad science, and so far that’s all I’ve seen as far as the ‘masks are effective’ studies go.

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