Facemasks in the Covid-19 era: A health hypothesis | Hacker News Reader

Facemasks in the Covid-19 era: A health hypothesis

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

1 pointSQL22192 comments

I was suspicious from the title itself, but there is this gem: "34,166,633 cases were reported and 1,018,876 have died with virus diagnosis. Interestingly, 99% of the detected cases (I assume the 34.1M reported cases) with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic or have mild condition".

So, 99% of detected cases (33.7M) are mild or asymptomatic making only 1% severe (0.34M), yet there are 1M deaths.

It may be an honest mistake (perhaps they were looking for the word "estimated" instead of "detected cases"), but it's hard to keep any trust in the authors doing their math correctly on more important points.

I think he's drawing a distinction between people who died with the virus and people who died from the virus. That sounds like 2/3 of the deaths were people who died of other things but happened to have the virus. (This is a popular statistic for those denying the significance of the coronavirus.)

But there is a lot suspicious about this paper. The papers he cites don't support his conclusions about the terrible things he claims masks do. A mask can't trap enough air to cause hypoxemia or hypercapnia. People wear N95 masks all day while doing intense physical work, such as painters and carpenters, with no ill effects.

The study about surgeons, for example, is testing people who are doing rather intense work -- of course their O2 sat goes down. The fact that it's just 1% shows that they're in good shape for doing that work. The mask has nothing to do with it.

The paper is reaching to support a conclusion that simply isn't justified. The particles that carry viruses are much, much larger than oxygen and CO2 molecules. It's simply not possible for a mask to both be ineffective at stopping coronavirus and to cause breathing problems. It's like declaring a collander to somehow be ineffective at retaining spaghetti while simultaneously holding on to all of the water.

Politifact has reviewed this article and pronounced it False:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/apr/16/diamond-an...

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