Hacker News Reader

Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

'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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com