It’s been three weeks since the publication of “Do physical measures such as hand-washing or wearing masks stop or slow down the spread of respiratory viruses?” (Cochrane):
We identified 78 relevant studies. They took place in low-, middle-, and high-income countries worldwide: in hospitals, schools, homes, offices, childcare centres, and communities during non-epidemic influenza periods, the global H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, epidemic influenza seasons up to 2016, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified five ongoing, unpublished studies; two of them evaluate masks in COVID-19.
Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/COVID-like illness (9 studies; 276,917 people); and probably makes little or no difference in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test (6 studies; 13,919 people).
Compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, wearing N95/P2 respirators probably makes little to no difference in how many people have confirmed flu (5 studies; 8407 people); and may make little to no difference in how many people catch a flu-like illness (5 studies; 8407 people), or respiratory illness (3 studies; 7799 people).
In other words, we’re back to Science v2019: the only way to avoid infection is to stay home, not to go into a theme park during Christmas vacation wearing a cloth mask (Faucism), a surgical mask, or an N95 mask (True Science).
The masked faithful who’ve continued with their rituals after the Covidcrats rescinded their orders requiring masks (illegal in Florida!) say that they’re Following the Science. So we might expect a dramatic change to the slope of the de-masking curve now that this utterly reliable organization has come down with its verdict.
What have you seen out there in the wild? It’s tough for me to observe any changes here in Florida due to the small sample size (a handful of old/sick-looking people are sometimes observed in masks). I have queried mask believers in Massachusetts and California and they say that they are not going to change their behavior in response to the Cochrane article. Part of their justification is that they believe themselves to be vastly superior to the average person, including the health care workers in some of the studies underneath the Cochrane analysis, in competence, diligence, and consistency. Masks will fail for the incompetent rabble, but not for them.
Some excerpts from a Maskachusetts mask-believer:
Stupid people will do stupid things. Incompetent people will muddy the signals for otherwise potentially beneficial countermeasures. And your governor is still a douchebag, even if it is true that the Black History AP course [sic; the correct title is “AP African American STUDIES” (not “history”)] was politically motivated. Also, plain water and hand rubbing was shown by the CDC to be effective in getting virus particles off your hands.
(Hatred of Ron DeSantis is “Carthago delenda est!” for Democrats? I never mentioned Ron D when asking him how the Cochrane study would affect his behavior.)
From my Boston/DCA flight in January:
Philip, what does “Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only” mean?
What is _in the community studies_ doing there?
Do they think doctors are aided by wearing masks in the hospital?
If they help in the hospital, do they think they lose effectiveness when they walk out the door?
David: You can see all of the underlying studies summarized in https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/epdf/full
It doesn’t seem as though the authors found a study showing that doctors in hospitals could beat respiratory viruses in the long run via masks.
I spend quite a bit of time at a hospital in the greater Boston area. My next visit is in a few days and I’ll be keen to observe the masking behavior. I will also need to stop twice along the way for various reasons, so I’ll be able to observe some “man on the street” activity near Beantown as compared to my location in the Deplorable Zone.
So mark your calendars (yeah…heh) and I’ll post an update soon.
Is “Dr” Phil now a creepy old man taking pictures of young girls in public, under the guise of documenting the continued use of masks? The Republicans are afraid of “groomers,” “drag queens,” and “same sex bathrooms.” But Republicans outnumber Democrats somewhere between 5 to 1 and 10 to 1 (depending on the data) in sex crime convictions.
https://www.dailykos.com/history/user/CajsaLilliehook
I checked the interwebs and they said that picture isn’t pedophilia. But stay tuned…definitions could change at any time to suit your cause.
Sam: What is most interesting to me about Mike’s post is that he uncritically accepts the idea that sex criminals are passionate about a political affiliation. It shows how strong the human tendency of projection is! (Or, perhaps Mike himself is a convicted sex criminal and is sharing real-world experience?)
(I guess there is some support for this idea, e.g., “Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier charged with sex trafficking, has been a prolific donor to various Democratic campaigns and party committees over the past couple decades” https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jeffrey-epstein-donated-democrats-1990s-early-2000s/story?id=64255485 But do we imagine that Mr. Epstein spent a high percentage of his time thinking about the Progressive causes that consume today’s Democrats? Or was he more interested in getting the right catering for his Gulfstream, finding some additional cash-oriented young ladies, etc.?)
@CbeM, if http://www.dailykos.com [1] is your source of news and for scientific data, than God help us. You are better off reading http://www.rt.com than http://www.dailykos.com and I mean this with sincerity.
[1] I never knew of this website until you mentioned it.
It could be that Mike is a dumb dumb.
“ Part of their justification is that they believe themselves to be vastly superior to the average person, including the health care workers in some of the studies underneath the Cochrane analysis, in competence, diligence, and consistency. Masks will fail for the incompetent rabble, but not for them.”
Looking over the studies analyzed in this meta-study, one flaw that I see is the heavy reliance on people in hospital contexts. A counterintuitive truth about viral diseases is that you need to surpass a threshold exposure to the virus in order to get the disease. For example, a single virus in your bloodstream is not going to do it. This is true even with HIV.
If a mask reduces the intake of viruses by about half, which is what Japanese studies have shown (ironically with not that much difference between cloth masks and surgical masks), then it might be possible for someone whose exposure to the virus consists of shopping trips, occasional trips to the movie theater, and so on, to stay below the infection threshold, while someone who is exposed to the virus eight hours a day, five days a week in an environment where the virus is more likely to be present is going to blow way past the threshold, even with a 50 percent reduction due to the mask.
A raincoat will keep you dry during a twenty minute walk in a light drizzle. It won’t keep you dry while standing under fire hoses for twenty hours no matter how good the raincoat.
The Achilles’ heel of medical research is that it tends to lazily rely on research protocols that use easily and readily accessible data. It’s easier and cheaper to get a large sample size by focusing on hospitals than it is to try to recruit individual citizens and to make sure that they’re a representative sample of the population. In addition, it’s easy to base studies on natural experiments, such as geographically different or chronologically offset groups subjected to different mandates.
You see this same bias in research on carcinogens. California requires anything that could cause cancer during someone’s (1 in 100,000 people) lifetime to have a scary warning label. Realistically you have to study this with, say, 100 mice over no more than a year. So they massively overdose a few dozen mice with acrylamide and use some math to extrapolate that to millions of humans over a lifetime — and then use that to label Lay’s potato chips as dangerous.
All we really know is that massive doses of acrylamide kill mice and masked people who work 40 hours a week among sick people will get Covid. That’s it.
Better late than never, as it were: here’s an update on the masking status quo at a hospital in the Boston area:
The Hospital is still following, at least in a half-hearted “buffet Christian” style of devotion, to the Fauci Catechism: everyone entering as a visitor must take a cloth “surgical” mask and make it fit however they please. The staff and doctors are also masked, but many of the doctors remove them once they are in their offices, and other staff members randomly lapse enough times during the day that mask protectiveness is sacrificed. If you speak to most people quietly – both patients and staff – they will tell you that they hate the masks, and while I saw/heard absolutely zero Karens, absolutely zero Karens. So now they are doing it like some vestige of early Christian sin atonement, like wearing hair shirts, etc. That, and the fact that everyone is doing it because:
Every hour or so, the public address system broadcasts a recorded Mask Policy Message throughout the campus, telling people the rules: everyone must wear a mask, no food is allowed outside the cafeteria in any area of the hospital, and if you need to use your cellphone without a mask, you are supposed to go outside in the MA winter to make the call.
So at the hospital they are still following the Fauci Path, although they are leaving the enforcement up to a recorded message and most people hate them. When I got to where I was going, I accidentally left mine hanging around my chin and nobody batted an eye.
I suspect the same is still true at other Massachusetts hospitals and medical facilities, as a matter of official policy that is only being halfheartedly adhered to because a full mask abandonment is not yet official policy. I’ll give periodic updates and we’ll see when that changes.
Addendum: Hand sanitizer is everywhere but very few people are using it. I didn’t see any mortals using it today, however the doctors and nurses sanitize their hands whenever they touch a patient or are doing things like drawing blood, which I would expect. As far as I can tell that practice is just good hospital hygiene and not associated with COVID. Nobody is wiping down surfaces like chairs, wheelchairs, tables, countertops, etc. after each person; that stopped about a month ago.
So that’s the lowdown!