The Masks Were Working All Along | Hacker News Reader

The Masks Were Working All Along

theatlantic.com

28 pointsdredmorbius14 comments

'The study encompassed roughly 350,000 people in 600 villages." - wow, sounds promising

...

"Their conclusion? Masks work, period.". That's it. That's all they wrote. Not a single shred of data. No link to the study. Just "masks work, period". Do they prevent spread by 10%? .01%? 90%. Who knows, they "just work". Fantastic journalism. Could at least link to the actual study so people could see the data rather than your opinion piece.

The rough numbers are given in the article, you just have to scroll down: ~10% fewer cases. The paper was also pretty easy to find based on the information in the article, but it's not directly linked. That's pretty common in non-scientific publications like The Atlantic.

Here's the paper: https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-...

"The proportion of individuals with COVID-like symptoms was 7.62% (N=13,273) in the intervention arm and 8.62% (N=13,893) in the control arm."

Yes, that's an 11% reduction from the control group.

From TLA:

  The randomly assigned pro-masking policy reduced the number of confirmed, symptomatic COVID-19 cases in the intervention group by nearly 10 percent, relative to the control group.

From the paper:

  The intervention led to a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence [...] and an 11.9% reduction in the prevalence of COVID-like symptoms

Wow, based on that study masks are way less effective than I thought. They couldn't find any significant impact on COVID from cloth masks, even though the study was quite large. And increasing usage of surgical masks by 30 pp reduced the number of cases by 10% - which is pretty good, but still not nearly the numbers I've seen floating around, especially when considering that villages with masks also had increased social distancing.

Not to say that the mask mandates were entirely useless, at least for indoors (outdoor masking seems kind of pointless), but it doesn't seem like they are as significant as we thought.

That was my take.

When this first hit I quickly read every mask study I could find, typically concerning flu transmission.

My rule of thumb immediately became that it's pretty much useless outside of N95 masks...which luckily I already had a case of for use in my shop. Most people appear to wear the functional equivalent of a sock, oft times with their nose showing.

I am starting to believe that the biggest effect of masks was (is) to remind people to stay distant, which does seem to have useful effects.

At the cost of touching their face, build-up of funkiness (it isn't like they put on a new mask all the time), unwarranted confidence.

> At the cost of touching their face

I assume you mean while putting on or removing the mask.

But, anecdotally, I've noticed that wearing the mask seems to inhibit high-risk touching behaviors (extreme examples would be nose-picking and fingernail biting).

I suspect that people wear masks as protection and linger around in closed of spaces too long. Masks are probably good for suggesting big aerosols but the small ones will linger in the air.

Most people around here seem to hate wearing their mask and look for any excuse to remove it. If that means moving to a less risky area, that seems like a desirable outcome.

They do make masks that can significantly filter an airborne virus out of the air you breathe, but they aren't cloth, and they have to be fitted tightly to your face so air cannot leak in and out around the sides of the mask.

>Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.

On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

This seems more like it should be “The Masks Were Barely Working All Along.”

Sadly the effectiveness of surgical and cloth masks just isn’t very good [for COVID]. And we see that being used as ammunition by the anti-public health measures crowd now. Truth is we knew this much earlier in the pandemic. Just as we knew it was spreading via aerosols but took forever to acknowledge that officially.

N95/KN95 style masks would show a much greater response and we should have a officially acknowledged that. Ideally we should’ve made them available to people once they became more available later in the pandemic.

Seems like this article is a flame for the anti-mask moths.

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