Dave B wrote: ↑Tue May 11, 2021 12:05 pm
1. It's not masks versus not masks - it's a continuum in compliance. Without quantification of mask compliance in your comparison, you're just guessing at causal effects. Not very sciency in my book.
2. Cherry picking a set of places that confirm your bias isn't a controlled study, the study I presented was statistically controlled as well as they can be, and you ignored it. Not very sciency in my book.
3. There are a lot of issues that go into transmission, not just masks. Ignoring all confounding factors and myopically focusing on masks is, not very sciency in my book.
4. Masks are very much known to reduce disease transmission, that's why they wear them in ER/OR. The physics are pretty easy to understand, the *reduce* the spread of aerosol droplets. Ignoring this simple fact is not very sciency in my book.
And *my* book is the only one that matters.
I don't need to cherry pick any particular places. I can replicate those results all over the world, I just choose the particular countries because they are well-known and it proves my point. I challenge you to produce
any results that refute my main thesis. Your Italy paper is bunk because it fails to explain the precipitous rise shortly after the study ends, and doesn't offer a control of no masks. It doesn't control against the seasonal effects that are well-known to be significant for virus transmission. I'm not cherry picking, it's just a bad cherry-picked paper.
Funny how when interventions don't work it's because there are a confounding number of factors, but when interventions do "work", it can be mostly attributed to masks. Please explain this logic.
Here's a study from 1981 showing that masks actually don't make a difference in the ER/OR environment.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... 9-0009.pdf
The idea behind surgical masks is to reduce the odds of bacteria-laden droplets and FOD from falling into giant gaping open wounds. It is a massive leap in logic to abstract this effect to preventing the transmission of aerosolized virus particles. I don't think anyone disputes that masks reduce droplets, I just dispute that it actually matters in the real world. You've made the leap in logic that reducing droplets results in a reduction in transmission and the real world data just doesn't support that claim.
There is in fact a word specifically created to describe abstracting logical principles to "prove" a hypothesis without actually measuring anything or conducting a controlled experiment: pseudoscience.