Hacker News Reader

Comment by chowells | Hacker News Reader

What you are seeing is science in action. We started with some guesses and a lack of on-point evidence. And even some common misunderstandings of historical evidence. More evidence was gathered. Guesses turned out to be wrong. Contradictions were found. Recommendations were updated.

This what doing science looks like. This is working correctly. You haven't pointed out any flaws, you've pointed out a success case.

View on HN

He confidently told New Yorkers not to worry and they shouldn't stay at home in march. Pretty sure him saying that increased the deaths by many thousands there. At the time other countries had detected covid cases originating from New York, and New York barely tested but a huge amount of of those tests were positive, everyone who read a bit knew it was bad there but he just ignored it and told them to go on with life as normal. So I don't trust his judgement, at the time it was Democrats position to downplay the disease so that is what he did. Then Democrats switched position and so did he. I really doubt he will always do what is best for people instead of what is best for Democrats. I'd rather listen to scientists who aren't so political.

Edit: I'm from Europe so don't assume I'm a Republican just because I criticise him.

Well, this "science in action" garbage is certainly this week's attempt to save the institutions from self-immolation, but it simply doesn't hold water:

1. The initial statements were not guesses. They were an accurate summary of the state of the scientific literature at the time and were presented as such ("there is no specific evidence", "there is some evidence to suggest the opposite").

2. The later change, which occurred with whiplash-inducing speed, wasn't based on any new evidence or studies. That's why Fauci had to come up with this story about how they'd been engaging in a noble lie: there was no new evidence for him to point at.

3. There is now clear evidence that mask mandates don't work, namely the real world data, yet recommendations have not changed and all this new evidence has been ignored.

Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.

I don't really know why you're trying to defend "science" in the abstract like this. COVID science is the work of specific groups of people, it's not an abstraction, and it turns out to fall far short of the lofty standards we were taught to expect at school. COVID science in the real world is riddled with obvious hypocrisy and contradictions, routinely ignores or even rubbishes any evidence that would undermine collectivist social policies or make scientists look bad, and just in general is a sad joke. Arguing that this obvious failure is actually a success, and this is what all science looks like, can only make things worse by harming trust in other groups of scientists with higher standards (e.g. maybe physicists?).

> Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.

I am sorry, but this is a BS argument. First of all, COVID-19 (classic variant) had a 7 to 14 days incubation period. Upon infection rate curves it acts as a low-pass filter (aka smoothing filter). You will not see sharp drops even if contagion abruptly stops. The curve will decay over one or two weeks. Also, mask mandates were not introduced at random moments of time. Typically they were enacted or enforced when infection was on the rise. At best the expectation was that masks will slow down the up-trend.

Obviously, masks do not fully protect against inhaling the virus. But they do limit the blast radius from infected people coughing and sneezing. This is why in Asia people are routinely wearing masks during a regular flu season. Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree. Common sense is oftentimes better that shaky science on top of questionable data.

Incubation period was/is definitely not 14 days, more like 3! Two weeks could easily be infection to death at the start. No, mask mandates should have shown a very sharp and artificial drop in every case where they were enacted, but that never happened.

"Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree"

So you assert yet nobody can show it doing so in the real world data. Places geographically next to each other that differed in mask mandates saw no impact. The UK removed its restrictions in the summer and cases immediately fell. Etc etc.

When you impose mask-mandate related events with the case curves this becomes especially obvious:

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...

I would prefer to call recent events science under pressure. One could argue that good science takes time. People need time to think about ideas, time to think about ways to test the ideas, and time to engage in discourse without duress. Both politicians and the media, in my opinion, are a detriment to good science. They may be a necessary evil to provide support for funding, but their short-term goals are antithetical to thoughtful discourse.

No it wasn't. Mandates were enforced on flimsy evidence that they might work. It was simply security theatre. In some cases many have even admitted that it was done to make people "feel safe".

The Effectiveness (or lack thereof) of specifically the masks has been investigated in many settings with the flu many times before.

e.g.

This was published back in 2014:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Page 44-47 of the PDF goes over in length masks used in a community setting. They specifically talk about compliance, what sort of mask was being worn and whether the mask was fitted and how that may have affected the results of various studies, transmission rates etc. Many studies found that people stopped complying after a certain amount of time, other found it varied on the culture.

What did we see with mask usage during COVID? Many people wore the same mask for days on end, or they put them in their pocket, or just stuck one of the passenger seat of their car (like my neighbour did). Some stopped bothering wearing the mask after a few weeks, and there was differences in compliance dependent on the culture.

A lot of this was known back in 2014.

You can find numerous other studies going back years now on the relative effectiveness of masks and different types of masks and the result for cloth masks (which the types that people were using) weren't great.

Are you telling me that all these medical professionals that had the ear of officials didn't know about any of this?

Yeah, sure... until someone doesn't want to get vaccinated, until the vaccines are more throughly tested (especially long-term studies). Then they get called many many science-denying names, and practically forced to do it by their governments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com