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Study: Association between mask mandates and Covid infections in North Dakota
- edmcnulty101 4y agoIt's not necessarily because masks don't work, medical professionals use them to great success. Mask usage at the community level does not follow the same strict policies related to mask usage that medical professionals do, like discarding them between operations. Wearing the same mask over and over every day and removing it when you sit down to eat is a very ineffective policy. And it's kind of an abuse of power for the government to mandate something with such weak science.
- AnthonBerg 4y agoThis is a common misconception. The blame lies squarely on a grand failure of delivery of public health information. Outside an industrialized hospital sanitization chain, it’s actually fine to reuse a mask – as long as it’s a mask that works against SARS-CoV-2 aerosol to begin with. I can provide sources.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoThis article that you are replying to seems to work to contradict your claim and I've read numerous others that seem to as well. Would love to see your sources if you have them handy.
- gadflyinyoureye 4y agoPlease do. From what I've seen the best and science-based answer is that masks don't work. Air filtration does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFjLFqESxY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFjLFqESxY0. As another pointed out in a different sub-thread, N95s work as long as they are fit-tested and worn to spec. If you have facial hair, muss the banding so that it doesn't form a perfect seal, etc., the N95 might help, but is not a solution. This means that people with facial hair will not benefit from N95 neither in the form of protection of self nor others. We have seen in the US that children are now develop-mentally behind. The US govern said what was normal for 24 month child is now normal for a 30 month child. All for a mask program that never worked.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoPing
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoTeachers unions in the US are absurdly powerful unfortunately.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
- formerkrogemp 4y ago> Teachers unions in the US are absurdly powerful unfortunately. I doubt that very much given the spate of laws controlling teachers passed recently, the record low pay, record staffing shortages, and record resignations.
- AnthonBerg 4y agoWe also did not have data on the types of masks being worn or on masking adherence rates in the two school districts It is known that this is an aerosolized pandemic. Airborne. Cloth and surgical masks do not work. Source – there are many to choose from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673621008692?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362... The posted study on mandates has effectively no meaning. Closed FFP2/N95-style masks work. This is fact. A mandate does not make such masks magically appear on people’s faces. Therefore it is obvious that there is no effective correlation between the word “mandate” and what SARS-CoV-2 does.
- throwoutway 4y ago> Closed FFP2/N95-style masks work. Schools are not going to mandate this, and even if they do kids will wear them loose/wrong. So knowing that, where do school boards go from here?
- xracy 4y agoThis is a preprint study, also worth noting that the collection data for how they determined if the masks were being worn, was self-reported by the parents and school administrators.
- imnotreallynew 4y agoThere’s been quite a few of these studies, all with similar results. What’s unfortunate is that the remarkable “penetration” of the idea that cloth and standard surgical masks provided “adequate” (by any measure) protection was so great and peddled by such influential persons that there are now those who, despite plain empirical evidence, still maintain masks provide some material amount of benefit. I wonder at what point such people will began to consider the evidence in earnest, regardless of the fact that most of these mandates have thankfully been repealed.
- h2odragon 4y agoReligious belief is easier to create than rational opinion.
- robswc 4y agoI had the (mis)fortune of being on a college campus during the height of covid. I'm totally down for taking precautions. I'm not down for the idea that this behavior can't go too far. I remember seeing a kid forget to wear one and he was treated like a plague rat for the all of 5 seconds before he realized what was going on. Also, the "mask" thing was _never_ clear. It flipped very frequently. Sure, science can change but if its "changing" that much, that fast it does make me loose a bit of faith.
- rayiner 4y ago> Our findings 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’m glad that public health officials are actually doing this research and publishing these conclusions. Maybe I’ve gotten cynical, but I was worried that there would be limited retrospection about positions taken during the pandemic given the political sensitivities.
- indymike 4y ago> Maybe I’ve gotten cynical, but I was worried that there would be limited retrospection about positions taken during the pandemic given the political sensitivities. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and are better prepared for the next pandemic.
- barry-cotter 4y agoThat was a good laugh. Thanks.
- IAmGraydon 4y agoMonkeypox is now at 10,000 cases worldwide with a growth rate of 12% per day and we're seeing the same lagged response as we did with Covid. We've learned nothing.
- gruez 4y ago>Monkeypox is now at 10,000 cases worldwide with a growth rate of 12% per day Unless there's some additional context to this the figure of "12% per day" doesn't tell me much. Is this better or worse than covid? How does it compare to other endemic infections like the flu? Without knowing how bad the spread rate is, it's hard to know whether "the same lagged response" is justified or not.
- collegeburner 4y agoIt is almost entirely in populations of men who have sex with many male partners in western countries. It is much easier to reduce number of partners and be monogamous for a while (basically removes risk of monkeypox) than lock down everything (needed to remove most risk of covid).
- philliphaydon 4y agoDoesn’t seem like a very ground study. But living in Asia has taught me masks do work, and they work at school. My 3yo doesn’t get a cold when the 1 kid in the class is sneezing and coughing. The 1 case of covid didn’t spread in the school to Teachers or students. But I get there’s a bunch of adults who can’t wear masks as well as a 3yo so in that case the adults are more likely to catch or spread covid with their inability to wear masks right.
- josephcsible 4y agoYour one anecdote overturns this whole study?
- MuchoMaas 4y agoThat's nice. My kids' preschool in a blue state which mandated masks until spring of this year had constantly recurring COVID cases and exposures, including a Delta infection my kids brought home in October last year and passed to me.
- ceejayoz 4y agoA preschool is... not the best-case scenario for proper mask wearing technique.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agothree words: Upper Room UVGI https://mobile.twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/1512257760338927620 https://mobile.twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/15122577603...
- jtorsella 4y agoI'm surprised nobody has raised concerns about the authors. This group is notorious for producing near-fraudulent preprints in support of their preconceptions and widely publicizing them. Tracy Hoeg was responsible for an atrocious VAERS-based study making false claims about vaccine safety, and Neeraj Sood was intimately involved in the Hoover Institution's successful efforts in March/April 2020 to persuade certain media figures that Covid was less deadly than the flu. You can read more about that VAERS preprint here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/peer-review-of-a-vaers-dumpster-dive/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/peer-review-of-a-vaers-dump... and some related recent work around child vaccines here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/an-impossible-trial/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/an-impossible-trial/. I believe the third author is a professional covid skeptic associated with the organization "rational ground". This is not a reliable set of sources. I will have time to dig in later, but if this is anything like the rest of their work it's worthless garbage.
- toomim 4y agoWhy don't you read the paper and address its evidence and logic instead of ignoring it entirely for an ad-hominem attack on the authors? Ad-hominem attacks are worthless on any politically-contentious issue, because of course people are going to be trying to destroy the reputation of scientists who present data that opposes a political narrative.
- jacobolus 4y agoThis pandemic has sparked a whole industry of politically motivated “scientists” overhyping and misstating the results of their poorly designed studies. Examining the authors’ affiliations and past work is a good way to avoid wasting time. There are dozens of other studies about this topic, many of them done carefully by serious researchers.
- RayVR 4y agoIn fields where uncovering methodological flaws or malfeasance is difficult, prior history of the authors is a useful first approximation of how seriously the conclusions should be taken.
- gibbitz 4y agoIt seems that we're missing that this trend is likely due to the students contracting the disease outside of school. Most accidents happen within 30 miles of home doesn't mean you can take your seatbelts off when you are 31 miles away. This whole study exists to allow people to say masks don't help when they don't want to wear one. I get that there was a unique opportunity to compare and contrast here but what was being measured was only partly affected by the mandate. Regardless of the quality of the science here, the results are surprising, but I wonder what the comparison with a blue state district where the same mandates were in place would be...
- chiefalchemist 4y ago> Our findings 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. As expected. Simply put, as the science now states, the majority of masks weren't worth wearing. If it's not a KN95 or better, it's all but pointless. That is, you're effectively wearing no mask at all. We know this. Yet occasionally mask mandates kick in again, and the updated science (i.e., KN95 or better) is completely ignored. The disconnect - and those virtue signaling with subpar masks - is disturbing.
- chmorgan 4y agoAnother in a line of studies that have for a few years now been supporting this conclusion. The sad part is the hundreds of thousands of tons of waste produced due to ineffective mask materials, design, and usage.
- xlaacid 4y agoThe amount of variables not accounted for in this "natural experiment" is unfathomable. How did this get through a peer review....... oh wait, it didnt. Also, look under the authors, it lists "truth in data LLc" a right wing conspiracy nuthouse.