Much of the evidence cited in favour of facemasks comes from lab studies where researchers measure the amount of particles in the air after telling subjects to cough. A typical finding is that fewer particles are detected when subjects are told to cough whilst wearing a facemask.
So masks do work then? Not quite. Just because masks stop some particles doesn’t mean community masking has any meaningful impact on the spread of the virus. As the blogger eugyppius notes:
You need to inhale 5000 virus particles to have a good chance at infection. An infected cough releases 1 million virus particles. An effective and tightly fitted mask may stop enough droplets to keep all but 100k of those particles out of the air. Those numbers are hypothetical but you get the idea.
In other words, even if masks stop the vast majority of particles, they still let through many times more than would be sufficient for someone nearby to become infected.
So lab studies provide only very weak evidence to support community masking. What we really want are randomised controlled trials. A number of these had already been done for influenza, and they suggests that masks don’t do anything. Which is why health authorities initially advised against mask-wearing (before ‘The Science’ changed, and the urge to ‘do something’ kicked in).
Researchers did carry out a large RCT in Bangladesh, which was widely cited as evidence in favour of masking. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an RCT of masking per se – since the researchers didn’t hold everything else constant. So it shouldn’t cause us to update our beliefs much. After all, the lion’s share of RCT evidence still suggest that masks don’t work against respiratory viruses.
The problem with RCTs is that they’re expensive. This is particularly true in the case of masking because the hypothesised effect works at the community level, not the individual level. While masks may not protect the wearer, it is claimed that overall transmission will be lower if we all wear one.
The next best thing is a natural experiment. Which is exactly Neeraj Sood and colleagues analysed in their new study. (It’s a preprint, note, so hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed.)
The natural experiment took place in Fargo, North Dakota (the setting for the famous Coen brothers film), where two adjacent school districts adopted different policies on masking. At the start of the 2021–22 school year, Fargo Public Schools had a mask mandate in place, while neighbouring West Fargo Public Schools did not. The former then moved to a ‘mask optional’ policy on January 17th.
Importantly, the two school districts were similar in all other respects: total number of students, average class size, racial demographics, staff vaccination rate, social distancing policy etc.
So what was the outcome of this natural experiment? There was no difference in the rate of students testing positive – neither in the period for which policies on masking differed, nor in the period for which they were the same.
“Our findings,” the researchers say, “contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students.” I’d say they contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests masks don’t work in general.
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Why would they work?
In practical terms a mask can only increase the expected time before infection by minutes or hours (assuming you believe they’re that effective in the first place). Over the course of days, weeks or months you’d expect roughly the same number of people to become infected.
In Australia we know they don’t work and are performative theatre.
Our health ministers know this.
How do I know they know and everyone else knows who have spent about 30 seconds using their common sense?
We had mask mandates in restaurants.
You had to walk in wearing a mask but when you sat down at the table you were allowed to take them off.
Then you could talk, laugh, shout, cough, sneeze to your hearts content and not be mandated to wear the mask because everyone knows covid cannot spread when you sit down in a restaurant.
If you got up and went to the loo or bar you had to put them back on again because everyone knows restaurant seats and tables stop the spread of covid.
Case closed, they don’t work and every sane person with the ability to think for themselves knows it including the charlatans mandating them.
The ability to cover our nose and mouth with a cloth has existed for thousands of years.
Anyone who believes that covering our nose and mouth with a cloth is effective at saving us from respiratory disease and that it went undetected for thousands of years before we finally discovered it in he year 2020 is a f**king moron.
That is almost spot on. Whose bright idea was this anyway? I mean, there have been several instances of mass mask-wearing during pandemics of the past, eg. the flu pandemic of 1918, where there were similar encouragements and mandates as we see today. However, 1: I don’t imagine for a second (although I don’t know) that there was any evidence that they worked to reduce the total death toll or any other yardstick of effectiveness, and 2: given the estimated world population in 1918 of around 1.8 billion, the roughly 500 million death toll over two years amounts to almost a quarter of the global population. And that is DESPITE mask wearing. Are we to assume the counter-factual that the death toll would be even higher in the absence of such measures. One can only speculate, but if they can’t prevent a quarter of the world from dying, just a hunch but could they be a tad bit less effective than we’ve been hoodwinked into believing?
Ah, but can you PROVE the masks didn’t help reduce the spread?! Come on! Prove that negative!
You can only falsify a theory. You can certainly not prove a negative. There’s enough evidence that masks don’t do anything except make people look silly to ban them except from those who want to be silly.
It was satire… Didn’t you see the wink?
Neither side of the argument can be unassailably verified, as equal weight of evidence can be attributed to either depending on your perspective. Which is precisely why there is no justification mandating such an arbitrary “health protection” measure.
No it works in the maskers favour.
“Wear the mask, it’s a little inconvenient and may save lives. If you don’t wear one you are potentially killing people”.
And that was the narrative that was pushed and now you have people thinking the above when a person is not wearing a mask.
Around the start of it all, it seemed to me to be a kind of copycat job from common practice in certain parts of the world, such as crush loaded public transport – say, in Tokyo. Whether it works or not, it’s just part of the culture.
A good example is the Far East, full of Maskdroids yet during severe ‘flu epidemics there was no indication infections and deaths were less than in non-mask wearing Countries.
Anyone who has spent time is the Far East can tell you that the assertion that people in the Far East wore masks prior to 2020 is a complete myth.
Basically nobody did. Not even for pollution, which would actually make some sense. But even with appalling pollution basically no one wore masks.
You are wrong on that point. I live in Thailand and prior to 2020 seeing people wearing masks was commonplace. During the ‘burning’ season there is heavy air pollution so wearing N95 masks is the norm.
Also car/bus/motorbike maintainance is poor here and if you saw the amount of smoke belching out of the exhausts you will understand why many motorcyclists wear masks.
I also noticed this in Cambodia.
And fir centuries our ancestors who believed disease was carried by miasmas in the air, covered they’re mouths and noses with cloths, sometimes dished in vinegar, oils and scents.
Since diseases spread like wildfire, that suggests masking wasn’t a success.
A friend was on the Eurostar coming back from Brussels the other day. The toilet was broken & there was such a terrible smell that they offered to move people to other carriages. He commented to the other passengers, some of whom were masked; “but surely if we put masks on we won’t be able to smell it?” The masked ones confirmed it didn’t make any difference, he wondered if the penny dropped.
Spot the opportunism. The only benefit is in the bank accounts of the manufacturers. They avoid any attempt to claim how they “work”, and just assume that there is enough common ignorance to get away with it. E.g. they never explain what the physical dimensions of any typical virus is, compared with other substances, such as bacteria.
There is an even better study out from Australia, where participants were actually challenged with a similarly sized as SARS Cov2 but benign virus.
Result: Only a properly fitted and applied N95, plus portable HEPAfilter, plus full PPE, gloves and goggles can prevent an infection, for up to 40 minutes.
Any mistake or omission here and anything else is just theater.
And if you have a beard, you can forget even that combo.
Nuff said and studied:
Masks were and are Gessler hats.
Nothing else.
https://www.novo-argumente.com/artikel/wann_wirken_masken
Link to an English version?
I don’t know how much water vapour (and everything else it contains) the average human breathes out every 30 minutes.
But I do know it is more than can be held by a warm, crappy face nappy.
So where does all the moisture go? It evaporates, into the air!
Never mind the fact that the face nappy is to coronavirus as a wire fence is to a mosquito.
The packs even have it written upon them, that they offer no protection FFS!
They do indeed – but in such small font size that most will not read it, at least without a magnifying glass. It’s done to avoid being done under trading standards, it seems to me. Have a brief look at this: https://www.bsigroup.com/globalassets/localfiles/en-gb/product-certification/personal-safety/bsi-guide-for-personal-safety-equipment-0520.pdf In particular, page 8. Not only that, all the official bumf avoids the use of the term “mask”, for the same reasons.
The mask after 10 minutes is sufficiently wet to produce a hygroscopic gradient between the two surfaces providing a pathway for pathogens in both directions through the fabric of the mask – any mask of paper or cloth.
Talking or coughing reduces that time significantly.
This was well known prior to March – 2020 – and why hospital staff were trained to change masks every 10 to 20 minutes.
It’s winter here in New Zealand. Rainy and wet and nearly always windy. That doesn’t deter the majority from wearing face coverings everywhere. Including outside in that rain and wind. It drives me nuts.
There you go – another study to be enshrined as an eternal pre-print, probably never to be peer-reviewed and likely retracted before it sees the light of day.
What journal under the sun would ever commit such reputational suicide, after all?
Studies such as these miss one giant elephant in the room: That the obsessive prevention of the circulation of a respiratory disease will never eradicate it. If you allow a mild disease such as omicron to circulate freely, it is much safer long term to allow people to develop a natural resistance against this, rather than waiting, and waiting, while people’s immunity is steadily further compromised by lack of exposure to a range of pathogens. Then you find that people (especially the vulnerable population) are more vulnerable to a novel disease that might emerge some time in the future.
The cure – the healthy response of our immune systems (honed over time through exposure to many different pathogens) – is in this case better than prevention!
I am absolutely certain that those pushing masks are well aware of their negative ‘benefits,’ Fauci certainly is. That is why they are so keen to promote them.
Simply invert any official advice – it works every time and helps keep you safe.
I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t write off the possibility that they are morons.
Just think the number of people you would otherwise think intelligent who have shot themselves up with experimental jabs for a disease that poses no threat to them.
Fauci apparently is one of them
Exactly. We NEED each others germs – the latest little update – as often as possible.
And remember the old history lesson about what happened to indigenous populations when various people immigrated to their territory, such as in New England, and so on. Their immune systems didn’t work very well then, whereas the immigrants lived with various infections, and unfortunately dished them out unintentionally.
The problem was Europeans took pathogens with them that their immune systems had got used to over many generations, so the pathogens had non-fatal effects. The New World natives had immune systems meeting these pathogens for the first time, so we’re defenceless.
The respiratory virus environment is very competitive, with mild virus spreading fastest and displacing the more harmful slow- coaches.
So yes, best policy is allow the most infectious versions to spread as fast as possible.
‘An effective and tightly fitted mask may stop enough droplets to keep all but 100k of those particles…’
CoV 2, as with other respiratory viruses, are spread predominantly by aerosol not droplets. Whilst a droplet is a particle in the general sense, it should not be confused with a viron, also a particle, and much smaller than a droplet.
The N95 (gold standard, respirator mask) is effective at stopping 95% of particles (water droplets for which it is designed) of 3 micron and above. CoV 2 is half that size.
The great mask fallacy was based on the claim CoV2 was only transmitted in water droplets which could be stopped by masks, and coughing aside, would fall to Earth within 1m or 2m or 3ft or 6ft depending on the phase of the Moon.
Virons spread in aerosols exhibit Brownian motion so can circulate in the atmosphere of indoor spaces for hours/days and easily be moved throughout a space/building by air-currents and ventilators.
It is why masks not only do not but cannot work, unless they are the type used by HazMat teams.
Medical/surgical masks were only ever designed and intended to reduce wound infections during surgical procedures, caused by bacteria laden water droplets exhaled from personnel close to the open wound, and are effective for short periods.
They were never intended to protect the wearer.
There are a number of trials comparing post-operative wound infection where masks were worn during surgery and not worn. The trials revealed no statistical difference. So masks don’t work for anything except for show.
There was never any consistent, convincing evidence for masks
It was always theatre
Forget all the arguments about RCTs or mechanistic studies in labs with crash dummies etc etc. We just need to listen to what industrial hygienists have to say. Their very business is to advise how to keep contaminants, airborne or otherwise, out of people’s bodies. https://www.tyscienceguy.com/mask-documentary-series.html
If worn correctly and made from the correct material, masks may help reduce the transmission of the virus in certain circumstances. I count 6 conditionalites in the government’s own commentary. To which you can add——stored correctly, replaced after two hours, not handled-WHO. I can see pupils wearing them appropriately. Does that make 168 reports/studies?