The effectiveness or otherwise of wearing masks

Life Health & Fitness
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1742

I just wanted to point out that it does not make sense to wear a mask most of the time and then not wearing it when the chance of getting the virus is at the highest.

I don’t like when people exaggerate the risks of a Covid infection, but I equally don’t like it when people minimize the possible health risks that comes with it. The worst that can happen is not spending a week in bed. The worst thing that can happen is death, even if you are young and healthy. The second-worst thing is long-term damage to your lung and what not. Now, does the possibility of death or long-term damage justify all those government actions? That’s another question.

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1743

Well, that’s true enough, but what seems to have happened here is that the authorities have magnified some slight, largely-hypothetical benefit into a belief that masks are a magic shield against COVID.

And the main point of my response was to point out that those hypothetical instances where a mask might “work” are those where you would least want to wear a mask, because - for whatever reason - it ruins the experience. I find few things more irritating these days than hearing someone go “womfle womfle frffle” behind a mask instead of just bloody talking to me with their mouth like a normal fecking human being.

I’ve wasted an inordinate amount of time going through the statistics and the research, and I can state with absolute confidence that this is nonsense. I even post my findings here, and it gets routinely ignored. There was no discernible increase in all-cause mortality in under 40s during 2020. None. Zero. Young and healthy people - the sort of people who go to gyms - simply do not die of COVID. I’m sure you can dig out a few fluke instances, but these are true black-swan events, where some unfortunate confluence of circumstances has produced a tragic outcome. We’re talking chances of death lower (much lower) than being killed in an industrial accident or a car crash.

As for “long-term damage to your lung”, again, no. This might have occurred with the earlier strains. A well-documented characteristic of omicron is that is doesn’t cause the kind of deep lung damage that was observed with the 2020 strains. We also have no way of knowing how much of the ill-health that people are currently experiencing is due to COVID and how much due to vaccination or other interventions, thanks to deliberate pollution of the data by State agencies.

No, because the underlying premise is that you can prevent exposure to COVID by wearing masks, etc. This claim is false. You cannot. I think the general consensus is that 95%+ of the global population has been exposed to the virus sufficient to generate an immune response. This is prima facie evidence that none of those interventions worked. We don’t need RCTs or anything else to demonstrate that it was all pointless. Whether masks slowed down that exposure is of no importance whatsoever - even if masks were a 100% impenetrable shield, it would have altered when people were exposed, not if. Because eventually you have to take the mask off.

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1744

That’s a…really odd table. Where did it come from, and what are the percentages supposed to represent? To three decimal places, no less.

Many of the percentages under “wear face coverings” seem to be obtainable by dividing the corresponding values under “no face coverings” by ca. 2.8 (or 2.8253138, as the authors and CECC might write it), especially for the low-occupancy and short-time regime*.

I assume that means one has been calculated from the other by estimating a mask effectiveness on the order of 65% (i.e., a 65% reduction in whatever scary percentage the authors are claiming to measure).

(*There’s some other stuff in there as well, especially for the situations approaching 100% in some cells - maybe the authors realized it would look silly to suggest that people have a 176% risk of whatever if they don’t wear a mask.)

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1745

Taiwanese Friend of mine works at a medical clinic, she and colleagues wear masks. Being Taiwanese they also wear masks out of the clinic at all times.
3 of her colleagues have had Covid in the past 3 weeks, she now has it, however they still go to work because the Doctors have people booked in AND it’s safe for infected staff to treat them as they all wears masks!

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1746

So the worst thing that can happen is death, not lying in bed for a week. lt might be unlikely, but there’s the possibility.

:man_shrugging:

1747

Wear a mask forever, then.

1748

There’s a possibility that you could be killed tomorrow in an alien invasion, or by a piano falling on your head from a tall building. I’m pretty sure you don’t worry about such things because the probability of them happening is, for all practical purposes, zero.

Risk is quantifiable. So is the cost of mitigation measures. If your lifetime risk of some particular bad thing happening is 0.0000003, and the cost of changing that probability to 0.0000002 is $100, would you spend the $100? How about if the mitigation measure introduces the risk of some other bad thing happening to you with a probability of 0.00007 - would you be interested in taking the mitigation measure?

There comes a point when some particular risk is so close to zero that anything you do to mitigate it inevitably introduces some cost which is worse than the original risk. Saying “oh, but it’s not exactly zero!” completely misses the point.

The nail in the argument’s coffin here is that, even after introducing the heavy cost of masking, you make no discernible difference to the original risk. Taiwan’s all-cause mortality line actually went up when the mask mandate was introduced. That was probably due neither to COVID nor to masking, but clearly masks did not have any dramatic positive effect.

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1749

l agree with all of that, l am only objecting the notion that the worst thing that can happen is lying in bed or it’s like the sniffles.

Btw, falling objects are a concern of mine and usually avoid standing outside residential high rises. Not because of the pianos, but the flower pots.

1750

I didn’t see that posted.

1751

And I take it you don’t routinely wear a helmet to mitigate this risk?

1752

Why are you? For the cohort I was talking about - people who are gym users - the odds of this outcome are absolutely overwhelming. It’s somewhere in the ballpark of 99.9995%. More importantly the outcome will be the same (as far as anybody knows) if you religiously wear a mask, and that’s true for all other cohorts, not just young and healthy people. In other words if you’re the sort of person whose cards are marked, your risk is entirely contingent on factors that are non-mask-related.

I really don’t think the “it’s not exactly zero!” argument has any bearing on what governments can or should do with “mandates”. Virtually nothing in life is risk-free. You can die drinking a cup of bubble tea, or taking a shower, or (as you said) from a falling wall tile. Certain rules and procedures are in place to make sure such things happen as infrequently as possible, but we don’t make a big deal out of them. Because they’re not a big deal. We certainly don’t grant governments emergency powers and set up a Shower Slippage Command Centre to hand out “mandates”.

There’s a third aspect to this: COVID responds well to both prophylactics and to treatment. There is no obvious reason to spend resources on “protecting” the 99.5% of the population who face no serious risk when those resources would be far better spent on the 0.5% who do.

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1753

There’s a risk to mask wearing as well:

"The Institute of Hydrobiology researchers in Wuhan counted the plastic fibres shed by masks over a month, using a laboratory device that simulated human breathing. They found that masks containing activated carbon produced the highest number of fibres, at nearly 4,000.

Those were followed by surgical masks, cotton masks, fashion masks and N95 masks, the brands of which were not specified in the study. Some of the fibres were several millimetres long, considerably larger than typical particles floating in the air."

Masks can filter air pollutants to varying extents, but with the exception of N95s, all produce more microplastic fibres than they filter (!), according to the new Chinese study.

The N95 respirator studied released only about half of the quantity of microplastics of a surgical mask.

The institute’s study also found that reused masks produced more loosened fibres. The worst structural damage was observed after applying alcohol."

Another study:

"This study analyses the amount, size, and composition of fibers collected from the use of both reusable and disposable face masks. The results presented are from one, four, and eight hours of continuous use of these masks while simulating human breathing. Each simulation was composed of three facemasks and one blank. Our results showed that fiber particles from masks can be inhaled, and masks marketed as a “reusable cotton face mask” released fibers consisting of cotton and polyester or polyethylene terephthalate (plastic). The blanks contained zero to four fiber particles. This is cause for concern as previous studies have shown that inhaled microplastics may be persistent in the lungs and cause numerous issues from prolonged inflammation; to some studies linking the presence of microplastics in the lungs to cancer.

As such, three years of mask wearing might well mean one is more susceptible to any Covid infection, especially when combined with the added stress of lockdowns, etc., and an immune system now possibly weakened due to taking too many shots, too often. :man_shrugging:

PS. Mask wearing can also come back to bite us down the track:

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1754

"A recent Cochrane Review — considered the gold standard of evidence-based medicine — is perhaps the closest medical conclusion on the validity of masks.

The review assessed 78 high-quality scientific studies. And its findings are illuminating."

Drum roll please :drum:…

The authors found “wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference,” when comparing masking with non-masking to prevent Covid-19.

What’s more, even for health care workers providing routine care, “there were no clear differences” between medical or surgical masks versus N95s, the review found.

From the Cochrane review: “The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.”

News report:
https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/truth-about-face-masks-and-covid-revealed/news-story/ccaefaecc2de8ecfba359c817dc2fad7

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1755

Drum rolls in 2023 are done like this:

Tumbleweed GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

I was trying to find some information on how (or if) healthcare workers were affected by COVID, and it’s surprisingly hard to come by. Presumably they were all fully masked up so it’d be an interesting cohort to study. This is typical of the sort of nonsense I found:

There is no “analysis” here; just a lot of handwaving and “well, this is all very odd, someone should investigate”.

Only in one graph caption does it actually mention people dying of COVID, but no further details are given of the manner in which they died. It just counts the number of people who died, and apparently:

There is also a remarkable correlation between the cumulative UK deaths from covid-19 in the UK population and among health and social care workers. Accepting a lag of one to two days, the ratio is very close to 1:200 so the deaths among health and social care workers are approximately 0.5 per cent of all deaths, suggesting they are not overrepresented.

Although there are caveats to this estimate — explained below — and every death is one to be mourned, the data does not clearly show that healthcare workers are dying at rates proportionately higher than other employed individuals or even the population as a whole. Again, this is cautiously reassuring.

Hmm. I suppose it could be that PPE is devastatingly effective.

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1756

This guy just appeared in my YouTube feed. There have been a lot of comments here on forumosa along the lines of “I’m glad my doctor wears a mask, he knows masks work”. Here’s a doctor explaining why surgeons (not doctors in general) wear masks. TL;DW it has little to do with infections.

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1757

Ok, @finley, all I really need to know about your apparent “anti-mask” vid is whether your alleged “doctor” is one of the approved ones. If he isn’t, then surely I can reject that video, even before watching it?

Please do tell. Is he Fauci-tramp stamped, or no?

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1758

At the 12:17 point in the video:
“A lot of the people commented that the reason why masks weren’t helpful in studies is that people weren’t using them properly. Although there was teaching in the randomized studies as to how to wear masks. And there’s no question that most people don’t wear the mask properly but that’s unfortunately real life.”

Mask mandates are wrong, in my opinion, both on civil rights grounds and on practical grounds. The practical reason is because it was obvious from the beginning that most people don’t wear the mask properly so why bother?

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1759

Another practical reason was also obvious: multiple pre-covid studies already demonstrated masks were next to useless, worn “properly” or not, full compliance 24/7 or not.

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1760

Did you watch the video Finley posted at 1714?

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1761

Yep. I watch all finley videos.

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