To Mask or not to two - Mask Megathread cont.

Do you disagree with the experts who published the multiple studies I referenced?

So far you have referenced a few cranks and an out of context quote from the beginning of the pandemic, one would not call that "research" in any way shape or form (but I can understand your clinging onto it).

According to your logic masks on their own are not effective. It is only when additional conditions A, B, C etc. are met that wearing masks makes sense, which would indicate that masks on their own don’t work. That may as well be one of the conclusion one could draw from the study.

The study mentioned provides a real life test bet for testing efficacy of masks. The only differentiator between the 5 and 6 year olds are the masks, no other additional conditions were imposed on either of the group. The kids in both groups have not changed their behaviour, which may be the best way to conduct such an experiment.

Your guess is very wrong btw.

In fact quite the opposite is true.

It is impossible to run such a random controlled trial with mask mandates in an open society. How is the 'control' to be established? It simply cannot be.

You are proceeding from an entirely false premise. Such RCTs are not an important \ necessary measure in rollout of public health measures.

We didn't run such RCTs for example to justify banning passive smoking in pubs.

We can look to large scale studies such as mask use in Bangladeshi villages which showed a reduction in cases when mask wearing increased, but a highly controlled study is not possible.

Similarly the Danish study showed a reduction in cases among mask wearers versus non mask wearers - not examining mask mandates, but voluntary wearers, but due to the low level of virus in circulation at the time significant number differences were not detected.

Yet somehow you have credentials enough to make that assessment? Nope, evidently you do not.

Well done, you've hoist yourself on your own petard and proven your own comments are irrelevent and of no value!

She was presented as a doctor, and in the context of the video, people would assume that to mean her doctorate is in human medical science. She is not a medical doctor. To present her as such is misrepresentation.

And if we're talking about the value of her opinion - I would also add the video content itself is an exercise is misrepresentation if not downright dishonesty. So doubling down there.

And in the credentials argument, if we're going for an argument from credentials, you keep running away from the salient point - the overwhelming weight of credentials in the authorities who recommended mask mandates. The actual experts in public health who have to make these decisions.

Once you brought credentials into it, you lost the argument.

Who said all mask studies are pretty worthless? That's a strawman without foundation. I said you are looking for a standard of study which is not feasible in the real world. A standard of study which is not necessary or required for public health measures.

It is that the mask studies are all limited in some way or another, need to be assessed as a whole in light of lab studies and case studies by the public health authorities whose role it is to assess such evidence.

You keep trotting out the same discredited arguments about masks when it is clear you are approaching them as direct PPE not barriers. And mask mandates were about masks as barriers.

You then engage in a gish galop throwing in random asides about eating or drinking... never really making it clear what you are talking about so it can't be refuted. You don't seem to understand how covid spreads or this distinction between masks as PPE versus barriers.

You are free to read, interpret and conclude on that paper findings yourself. Reach out to the authors if you wish, yo7 would be surprised how responsive some of them can be.

Interestingly, when needed the usual poster is nowhere near this post to question that Jason Abaluck, the author of the mentioned study in Bangladesh, is an economist. Since he is an economist and according to the logic and approval criteria presented here by him at nausea, the entire study is to be dismissed.

Same goes for Pratyush Kollepara, the author of the second study, who is just graduated mathematician, with very few publications in modelling complex systems. Applying same criteria, we have to dismiss this study as well.

In addition to that the researchers in Bangladesh were active on the ground promoting the use of masks as well as physical distancing and social distancing among the population at large One could argue that the study did not measure the effectiveness of masks, instead it measured the effectiveness of masks in conjunction with social distancing. Potentially two factors were at play - masks and change in human behaviour.

They looked at countries with mask mandates and then cases in the country and drew their own conclusions that masks don't work.

Yet they refuse to acknowledge that people don't wear them properly but to them that can't be the reason that masks don't work. Just, they do not work because they don't like to wear a mask and we all must follow their science.

What has the correlation between not wearing masks properly and mandates not working?