The Government on Wednesday published the evidence informing its recent controversial decision to recommend all secondary school pupils wear face masks in classrooms.
The new document from the Department for Education (DfE) explains that the decision “has been taken on the recommendation of UKHSA and is based on a range of evidence”. It says the Government has “balanced education and public health considerations, including the benefits in managing infection and transmission, against any educational and wider health and wellbeing impacts from the recommended use of face coverings”.
While conceding that the “direct COVID-19 health risks to children and young people are very low” – and rejecting SAGE’s advice to recommend masks in primary school classrooms (yes, really) – it claims that “the balance of risks for secondary classrooms has changed at this point in time, in accordance with the evolving evidence and the phase of the pandemic”.
The document summarises its evidence as follows:
Face coverings can be effective in contributing to reducing transmission of COVID-19 in public and community settings. This is informed by a range of research, including randomised control trials, contact tracing studies, and observational studies – assessed most recently by UKHSA, described in a review conducted in November 2021. The review’s conclusions were broadly in line with those of a previous Public Health England review; however, the addition of randomised control trials and substantially more individual-level observational studies increases the strength of the conclusions and strengthens the evidence for the effectiveness of face coverings in reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the community, through source control, wearer protection, and universal masking.
In fact, though, the UKHSA review from November 2021 found no high quality studies (except, it claims, the ONS study, which really isn’t high quality). Of the two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that have been done and which were cited by the UKHSA, the one from Denmark found no statistically significant reduction in COVID-19 incidence from surgical masks (the study didn’t look at cloth masks) while the Bangladesh mask study found no benefit from cloth masks and the reported benefit from surgical masks was just 11%, with a 95% confidence interval that included zero. The UKHSA review also considered 23 observational studies, which it said had “mixed” results and many of which were of low quality and small.
This does not seem a strong basis to claim a large effect for mask wearing. A recent more comprehensive review (which included earlier evidence for other flu-like viruses) by Ian Liu, Vinay Prasad and Jonathan Darrow for the Cato Institute, entitled “Evidence for Community Cloth Face Masking to Limit the Spread of SARS‐CoV‑2: A Critical Review“, concluded that: “More than a century after the 1918 influenza pandemic, examination of the efficacy of masks has produced a large volume of mostly low- to moderate-quality evidence that has largely failed to demonstrate their value in most settings.”
That is a better summary of the evidence than the DfE managed.
Needless to say, the DfE gives the propaganda value of masking a nod: “It can be a visible outward signal of safety behaviour and a reminder of COVID-19 risks.”
Notably, there is no mention in this document of the potential harms of wearing a mask for an extended period, such as the impact on breathing, the heart, or the skin. Contamination gets a brief mention, though it’s quickly dismissed:
Face masks and coverings will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. Disposal of single-use face coverings could theoretically pose a risk of transmission for inappropriately discarded face coverings, but it is very likely that the reduction in transmission risk due to reduced droplet and aerosol emissions from wearing a face covering significantly outweighs any potential for enhanced risk of transmission through inadvertent contact with a contaminated face covering. This is likely to hold regardless of duration that the face covering is used.
The reference provided for these claims is a SAGE document from September 2020, “Duration of Wearing of Face Coverings.” This is an interesting document, but it can scarcely be said to support the claims the DfE is making. On harms from masks, for example, it says:
Neither surgical masks nor face coverings are designed for use for extended periods. Wearing a face covering for an extended period can maintain a higher moisture level around the face which can be uncomfortable for some people and may increase the likelihood of skin complaints. Masks will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. A review of the downsides of face masks and face coverings (by Bakhit et al) found 20 studies reporting irritation and discomfort from using masks. Participants in studies with surgical or cloth masks reported difficulty breathing (12%-34%), facial irritation and discomfort (11-35%). More serious symptoms of headache, acne, rashes were associated with use of N95 and goggles. A study among healthcare workers (by Han et al) associates acne with extended duration of wearing. …
In a clinical study of extended wearing (by Chughtai et al), 124/148 participants reported at least one problem associated with mask use including pressure on face, breathing difficulty, discomfort, trouble communicating with the patient and headache. …
Measurements of heart rate during activity (by Li et al) showed significantly lower rates with a surgical mask compared to N95. In a study (by Fikenzer et al) of healthy young male volunteers surgical masks and FFP2/N95 respirators, both had a significantly marked negative impact on pulmonary capacity (FEV, PEV and PEF) while wearing the mask (with a spirometry mask) during exercise.
The DfE document omits to mention any of these issues. It does, however, include some recognition of the negative impact on education. It mentions a survey conducted by the Department in March 2021 that found “80% of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half felt wearing one made learning more difficult (55%)”. It also mentions a DfE survey from April 2021 that found “almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94%) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59% saying it has made it a lot more difficult”. It adds:
Research into the effect of mask wearing on communication has found that concealing a speaker’s lips led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort on the part of the listener. Moreover, meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker. A survey of impacts on communication with mask wearing in adults reported that face coverings negatively impact hearing, understanding, engagement, and feelings of connection with the speaker. People with hearing loss were impacted more than those without hearing loss. The inability to see facial expressions and to read lips have a major impact on speech understanding for those with hearing impairments. The worse the hearing, the greater the impact of the mask.
What about the evidence for the claims the document does make – that it is “very likely” that the transmission reduction from wearing a mask “significantly outweighs any potential for enhanced risk of transmission through inadvertent contact with a contaminated face covering” and that “this is likely to hold regardless of duration that the face covering is used”. This is what the cited SAGE document says:
There is a lack of good evidence relating to the wearing of face coverings, with very little data relating to duration of wearing. In particular we suggest that the following aspects would benefit from further research:
• Effectiveness of face coverings as a source control after longer duration wearing, including analysis of the influence of moisture on the performance of different types of face coverings.
• Analysis of the potential risk of transmission due to contaminated face coverings (during and after removal).
• Assessment of the prevalence of skin complaints associated with face coverings, including an understanding of the factors that contribute and potential mitigation.
• Analysis of user acceptability of face coverings for long duration use in different settings.
In other words, there was no good evidence on the things the DfE is claiming are “likely” or “very likely”, or on much else really.
The DfE also carried out its own analysis of the impact of masks in schools.
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not. The preliminary findings demonstrate a potential positive effect in reducing pupil absence due to COVID-19.
What did it find? It found that COVID-19 absences fell by 0.6% more (absolute reduction) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2-3-week period, which amounts to an 11% relative reduction.
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on October 1st 2021 to 3.6% in the third week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on October 1st 2021 to 3.0% in the third week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2-3-week period.
However, the study had numerous limitations, which made the finding a “non-statistical and unknown clinical significant” reduction, i.e., it may just be chance.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
Therefore, further work should be done to extend the analysis in terms of scope: for example, looking at different statistical methodologies, capturing different and longer treatment time periods and controlling for a wider number of school and local area variables to ensure this is a consistent finding.
The statistical uncertainty around the result was such that the 95% confidence interval for the effect size included zero (note in the below the upper CI is positive).
What’s more, the control group of 1,192 schools that didn’t use masks were very different to the 123 treatment schools which did, so that the above findings only emerged after substantial weighting was added to the control group schools using a process the document calls “entropy balancing”.
Exploration of the data showed that the control and treatment group had differing characteristics, so weights for the control group schools were calculated using entropy balancing.
Prior to this weighting, the non-mask schools actually had lower average absence rates throughout the study period – though the treatment schools reduced more from their higher starting point.
Prior to weighting, the mean absence rate of the control group increases across the treatment period, whereas the mean absence rate of the treatment group decreases. However, the absence rates in the control group remain lower overall than those in the treatment group.
All-in-all, not exactly robust, compelling evidence of the benefits of masking, particularly given all the well-documented harms, which the document itself either sets out or cites other documents which do.
The document at one point hints at what I suspect is the real reason masks were brought back into classrooms: “In a Unison survey of support staff, 71% said face coverings in secondary school classrooms are an important safety measure.” Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis wrote in the Times this week that: “Face masks have been a central demand of teaching unions.” Sounds vey much like politics rather than science to me. (See this recent Daily Sceptic article by Ben Irvine on the role the teaching unions played in forcing the Government to lockdown in March 2020.)
When are we going to stop harming our young people with pointless interventions to deal with a virus that poses no threat to them and let them live normal lives again?
Stop Press: Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine Carl Heneghan tells Julia Hartley-Brewer he is unimpressed by the Government’s “evidence” for masking in classrooms.
Stop Press 2: The Telegraph reports that some schoolchildren are rebelling. According to Damien McNulty, a national executive member of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers: “Sadly, we have had reports in the last 24 hours of at least six secondary schools in the north-west of England where children, in huge numbers, are refusing to take lateral flow tests or to wear masks. We’ve got one school in Lancashire where only 67 children out of 1,300 [5%] are prepared to have a lateral flow test and wear masks. This is a public health emergency.” Hats off to these young people for standing up for themselves against the unions and authorities who would force them to do harmful and pointless things. May their rebellion grow!
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‘…..scenarios were often wrongly treated by many as forecasts’
The usual cop out through semantics.
If the scenarios were not forecasts, then they were completely pointless. Why bother with them if they have no predictive value?
Utterly useless for planning purposes, as we have seen time after time after time……
What a complete shower…..!
Just like the Climatrons when their predictions failed to materialise, they relabelled them ‘projection’.
And also like the Climatrons, all reliant on modelling.
A proper scenario would be to compare the spread of an epidemic with perfect mixing to one with limited mixing. That would show that flattening the curve leads to the epidemic lasting a lot longer and resulting in large amounts of herd immunity. Hence small amounts of acquired immunity so that when you unlock you just get another wave.
Those “many” included, at the time, Whitty and Vallance and pretty much the entirety of SAGE, if I remember rightly.
‘….is the decline in independence the effect of SARS-CoV-2 or the effect of the restrictions?’
Quite clearly an effect of the restrictions and the vaccinations which, certainly in this household have, via giant cell arteritis and its steroid treatment, caused one family member to contract severe dementia and complete loss of independence.
Incandescent at the simperings of so many buffoons at this worryingly misdirected enquiry…..
Saddest of all is that, no matter what you think about lockdowns and restrictions and their importance for covid control, there was nothing to stop the over 50s (hardly old, but then I would say that when I’m in my mid-40s) or over 75s from leaving the house daily for a walk – other than the incessant fear porn of course. You could pretty much guarantee a brisk hour’s walk would not result in a covid infection. So not only did they not avoid covid by staying at home (and probably then caught it in hospital in the following months when requiring treatment for illnesses or injury caused by inactivity), they also reduced the quality and quantity of the rest of their lives, not to mention the burden on Our NHS.
No one was prevented from catching anything by staying at home. Airbourne, therefore by definition everywhere. Perhaps a good vacuum chamber would have been effective, but only at killing people. Masks, useless. Lockdown useless and harmful. All the effective things were banned, Ivermectin, and lots of other drugs. However the experiment was a success, vaccinating people without full disclosure, improper testing (actually almost none and there were deaths reported, and ignored). That is usually called Genocide by deceit.
None of these models ever seem to take into consideration the fact that only a small percentage of people exposed to a pathogen actually develop any sort of illness. I guess that is by design so they can claim their interventions work when not every single person in the world gets sick at the same time.
And the dead totals from Rona are bollocks. They include the fake tests and dying from something else but having a ‘symptom’ of Rona so the Quacks can attach Rona to the death cert and collect money – evthg was paid. But I doubt the money for Rona theme, will make an appearance in this sham confirmation er sorry, ‘inquiry’.
230 K did not die from Rona. 20-30 k died from and only from Rona. The rest were falsified numbers, including older people murdered with Midazolam (30 K?) but blamed on Rona.
This ‘inquiry’ is f*ing propaganda and about as real as the ‘science’ of Rona.
And didn’t they relax the rules for writing out certificates? Almost back to the Harold Shipman days – he would have made full advantage of it.
Yes that was mentioned in the book ‘Pseudo Pandemic’, New Normal Technocracy. Memory is a bit hazy but that was mentioned in the book that laws that were put in place post Harrold Shipman were relaxed.
Doctors were instructed to add Covid unless they could prove the patient did NOT have it. Hm…
They never seem to do any model validation as that would probably invalidate their model.
Surely you have realised that any of these computer models from Imperial are entirely fixed to produce the desired result? 500,000 deaths we the claim, at a cost of a few million quid I expect.
What Imperial College produced was not evidence. It was madey-uppy shite.
And as the headline draws attention to it: The virus could not have ‘continued to grow exponentially’ because it never started to grow exponentially. Death data which would have been available to planners (though it was not available to the general public until a few days later) up to the lockdown announcement showed that the rate of increase was already slowing – it never was increasing exponentially. That data showing the slowing of the rate of increase pointed to a peak in deaths occurring around 6 April – the peak was actually on 8 April.
The death data available up to the lockdown announcement on 23rd March pointed to a peak in early April which was already inevitable because the infections leading to those deaths had already occurred.
Sorry (not sorry) to keep banging this drum:
It was not exponential:
The above chart shows a best-fit exponential for the death data for England and Wales to 23 March 2020 and also the deaths where Covid was ‘mentioned’ on the certificate.
The planners should have trusted this empirical evidence:
The above chart shows change in rate of increase in 3-day average death count for England and Wales up to the peak on 8 April 2020. The red shows deaths that occurred before the lockdown announcement and the blue post lockdown. The red trend line reaches zero (the peak, no further increase in rate) on 6 April 2020 – two days earlier than what actually happened.
That’s what they should have done: Trust the Evidence
Not only was it not exponential but this has been known for several generations. Exponential growth in a finite world breaks realizability (a.k.a. common sense) when the number of infected is greater than the number of susceptible. And on to infinity. Reductio ad absurdum.
Being a deterministic process some event has to happen to kick it off the curve and onto a sensible one. This has to happen in an uncontrived way. Or, by Occam’s razor, it was never growing exponentially in the first place. For example the standard SIR model of 1927 vintage doesn’t grow exponentially. i.e. The model that is the basis for all the Covid modelling.
Of course an epidemic is a stochastic process. Its growth happens to be exponential multiplied by a logit-normal distribution with expected value corresponding to the standard SIR model. Remember one infects two who infect four. Or do the two try to infect each other and the first one?
More on YouTube
Also, phone calls to the covid phone line had peaked before any restrictions could have had an impact. Chris Whitty knows the first wave had peaked before restrictions could have had an impact. No doubt he’ll be correcting the Lead Counsel’s mistake.
No doubt he’ll be correcting the Lead Counsel’s mistake.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.
I remember Owen Jones arguing with Peter Hitchens about that….The fact that the curve was already decreasing is not an argument for Lockdown, but against.
Mmm, I take your point but we mustn’t give an easy target to the lockdowners. The rate of increase in deaths was slowing and It’s certainly an argument against lockdown. The daily rate of increase started at around 100% – ie double the number of deaths in the first day but by the end of the first week we were ‘only’ getting about 50% more deaths each day and by the time of the lockdown announcement we were getting around 20% more deaths each day. We reached the peak and the point that the number of deaths each day began to decline on 8 April.
With an average lead time of around 27days from infection to death (for those poor people who died) the infections leading to the deaths on 8 April were happening around 11th/12th March – ie before lockdown.
It’s not an inquiry. It’s a stage play from the same team that brought you the “covid pandemic”.
Shameless as well. We can all see the public inquiries going on in other nations that are actually savaging the establishment rather than slapping it on the back.
I wasn’t aware of that. Whereabouts?
From memory the Aussies and Americans. Seem to remember the Germans getting some good scrutiny.
Rand Paul has been giving Fauci a good grilling, for sure.
Never mind the conclusions, the whole thing is based on a false premise – that there was a “deadly pandemic” that constituted a “public health emergency”.
Whitty agreed with Prof Simon Wood, of Bristol Uni, that cases had peaked in advance of Lockdown 1.
Keith is trying to rewrite history. It’s not contentious that as cases had peaked before Lockdown then there was never a chance of runaway infections.
Yes didn’t Whitty say this to MPs?
“ it was almost assumed that what they would need was palliative care and that that should be provided in the care home rather than it being possible for them to be admitted to hospital for treatment”…..And with family members not aloud to enter, and Drs that can diagnose over a zoom call, it was fertile ground to bump up the ‘covid’ death numbers.
Aka virus spreads via permanent chains of transmission.
Nice idea, obviously loved by bigpharma, but patently false – which is why lockdowns, masks, distancing don’t really work.
Back to the drawing board you germ theory enthusiasts –
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-5-29
Also –
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra070553
If the NHS, sorry the governments propaganda health machine, actually cared about keeping us healthy they might try extolling the virtues of Viatamin D3/K2.
Also bear in mind that Hancock said, in Parliament, Vitamin D doesn’t work. May hell welcome him and his ilk with open arms.
Deciphering the bit about modelling and forecasting is actually not that difficult. A model is a computer simulation of some complex scenario which takes a set of input assumptions and calculates an output from that. Eg, if we assume that we’ll see 8000 COVID deaths next Wednesday given an assumed infection rate of 2.7182818 and assume that holding school sessions under water with triple-tested kids wearing two masks below their scuba gear reduces the infection rate at a speed of 0.049787 per day, how many deaths will the instead get next Wednesday? The important thing here is that this is a theoretical test of the effects some real world measure based on assumptions, ie, it’s all hypothetical and meant to be this way.
Of course, all of these subtle details will get lost when this is translated into headlines which will then shriek 8000 COVID deaths next Wednesday unless schools session immediately moved under water! But that’s certainly entirely unintentional and by no means meant to frighten anyone into actually supporting this proposal.
I have to take exception to the word exponentially, as used so often in fear-mongering.
Exponentially means increase at a continually increasing rate – or happening faster and faster – and continuing to infinity.
There are not enough people in the world to sustain an exponential rise in deaths, infections or anything else, however, that said, it does appear that the stupidity of our ruling classes is showing exponential characteristics.
Interesting, and then there is this, slightly off topic but still covid related.
https://youtu.be/qXglXTxXPlo?si=dGmE9Bmo7SVGYOeB
This “Inquiry” has one purpose only:
to absolve The Establishment from deliberately wrecking the economy and ruining millions of lives over a virus THEY ALREADY KNEW had very low mortality rates and who was vulnerable.
One does need to remember that the Barrister for the enquiry is there to represent the Government. Do not believe a word Mr Keith says. He is there to argue against any Government blame, and he will try very hard. The other side need to push very hard indeed for direct proof of every word presented, by all witnesses.