It was pretty clearly signaled that the masks are not to protect the wearer, but everyone else, in case the wearer is infected.
This hypothesis is why medical staff has been wearing masks for the past 100 years or so.
The author doesn't discuss this side at all; when he says "transmission", he doesn't specify who would be wearing a mask.
The only usable data in that article is that outdoors, the chances of transmissions are so low that masks aren't needed anyway. Which is something that was known early on.
The article says nothing about the most important question: if I'm sick and I cough/sneeze, does wearing a mask make it safer for people to be near me?
Well, for one, they won't be covered in my snot. Which makes me thankful for mask culture to begin with.
The masks might well be useless for COVID, but we can't conclude it from the article.
As a side note: for some reason, I haven't heard the anti-maskers complain much about the TSA (or even having to take the shoes off). Or arcane password guidelines (”6-8 characters, one capital, one number, one emoji, no three consecutive lowercase, no substring spelling out "bob", etc).
The point being, we are performing many rituals for the sake of "security"; masks, if proven useless, wouldn't be unlike many others.
So I feel like it's never been about the efficiency of masks, but about giving a visible indication to others that you're either on board with current virus prevention efforts, or on board with the "COVID is fake conspiracy causee by 5G to instill new world order" crowd.
This is exactly what the article talks about. From a public health perspective what you care about is the marginal benefit per percentage of masked population. The argument here is that it is spectacularly low, which we’ve known from RCTs even before COVID.
Marginal benefit per percentage of masked population sounds like a very flawed metric for me.
As an individual, it's not for me to worry about. What I'd want to know if a room full of masked people is safer for me than a room where some people aren't wearing masks.
The marginal benefit, I'd assume, would be low if most people can't choose whether to be in such an environment. But I can. Masks working well wouldn't contradict them having little marginal benefit, as, say, 10% of unmasked people might be the 10% that have covid (and, let's be honest here, there is a correlation, since anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and anti-whatever tend to be the same people).
Comments
It was pretty clearly signaled that the masks are not to protect the wearer, but everyone else, in case the wearer is infected.
This hypothesis is why medical staff has been wearing masks for the past 100 years or so.
The author doesn't discuss this side at all; when he says "transmission", he doesn't specify who would be wearing a mask.
The only usable data in that article is that outdoors, the chances of transmissions are so low that masks aren't needed anyway. Which is something that was known early on.
The article says nothing about the most important question: if I'm sick and I cough/sneeze, does wearing a mask make it safer for people to be near me?
Well, for one, they won't be covered in my snot. Which makes me thankful for mask culture to begin with.
The masks might well be useless for COVID, but we can't conclude it from the article.
As a side note: for some reason, I haven't heard the anti-maskers complain much about the TSA (or even having to take the shoes off). Or arcane password guidelines (”6-8 characters, one capital, one number, one emoji, no three consecutive lowercase, no substring spelling out "bob", etc).
The point being, we are performing many rituals for the sake of "security"; masks, if proven useless, wouldn't be unlike many others.
So I feel like it's never been about the efficiency of masks, but about giving a visible indication to others that you're either on board with current virus prevention efforts, or on board with the "COVID is fake conspiracy causee by 5G to instill new world order" crowd.
This is exactly what the article talks about. From a public health perspective what you care about is the marginal benefit per percentage of masked population. The argument here is that it is spectacularly low, which we’ve known from RCTs even before COVID.
Marginal benefit per percentage of masked population sounds like a very flawed metric for me.
As an individual, it's not for me to worry about. What I'd want to know if a room full of masked people is safer for me than a room where some people aren't wearing masks.
The marginal benefit, I'd assume, would be low if most people can't choose whether to be in such an environment. But I can. Masks working well wouldn't contradict them having little marginal benefit, as, say, 10% of unmasked people might be the 10% that have covid (and, let's be honest here, there is a correlation, since anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and anti-whatever tend to be the same people).