I think what many here and the writers of the article are missing is that you can both be truthful and misleading. These are not mutually exclusive. Let's start with the title: "The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science". If you just read this (titles are very important and most people only read these) what will you take away? What the authors are trying to say is that this one study has problems.
But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don't say masking is effective, they continually question if it is. This is really problematic. The study being wrong doesn't question _if_ masking is effective, but _how_ effective. There's a major difference in these statements and they can have readers, who are not experts and don't know scientific vernacular, to doubt and distrust more science than the article _technically_ draws into question. The article is suggesting that this is the norm and because this study is bad we get to question all the others.
So the problem here really is that while yes, the article only questions the one study they do so in a way that questions more fundamental knowledge that we have. Masking works. How much? Harder to say. There's a few old sayings such as "the devil never tells a full lie" or "the devil sows doubt" (often with truth). These are the errors that the authors are making here.
I would conclude that they aren't inaccurate, but are misleading.
> which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view)
This in itself is a tricky claim to make with confidence. I agree we know certain types of masks (N95) are highly effective at preventing spread of airborne illness if worn properly.
But... in the context of the article you referenced, are you prepared to defend the claim that cloth masks which haven't been washed for months and are frequently touched, adjusted, and worn incorrectly by kids and teens are "highly effective at preventing spread of airborne illness"?
I'm still waiting for the CDC to explain why last year when they were explaining how N95 masks required expert knowledge to use and that us dummies in the public would just poke covid in our eyes if we tried to wear them, how exactly that changed. Are we no longer dummies and capable of using masks without poking covid in our eyes or were they lying? And if they were lying, how many people died from using inferior masks since then based on the lie that cotton masks are somehow useful.
They wanted to save N95s for professionals due to a shortage. They lied. It's the same way the fed lies about inflation because people thinking inflation happening worsens the effects making it irresponsible to tell the truth.
How many people died? Hard to say. You have to also compare how many were saved because medical workers had access to N95 masks. But you're not considering this factor.
Honest truth is that it's complicated and people were trying their best. It's not a conspiracy it's just that we're humans.
I'm saying that things aren't simple. If you're not aware of cases where telling the truth is worse than telling a lie then I'd tell you that you're lying to yourself.
Are there Jews in my basement? No, Nazi fucks, not at all.
But that's not really the same thing as a critical taxpayer funded health body telling major fibs at the outset of a crisis. And if you think it is then who here is lying to themselves?
> They wanted to save N95s for professionals due to a shortage. They lied.
That's certainly a plausible interpretation of what happened. Another is they actually thought masks don't help in most cases and that covid wasn't primarily air-transmitted.
Do you have anything to support this “dummies” claim? What I remember from the N95 “guidance” (it wasn’t a “ban” iirc) was that the reason was to ensure there was enough supply of them for healthcare / frontline workers, who need them more than the rest of us, which made sense at the time (and I can see reasons why it would change later). I’m curious when that reason switched to “you are all dummies who can’t be allowed to use masks”?
They're still worth a lot. For one, mask mandates are going to encourage some people to wear non-cotton masks who would otherwise skip masks. For another, cotton masks are still better than nothing.
But I agree, we should statrt having stricter mandates.
You adjusted the parent's assertion by saying "worn incorrectly by kids and teens" where they only said "masks are effective".
Sure the original article was talking school mandates, but that wasn't the parent's point.
I don't understand how anyone can assert that masks are not useful in preventing the spread of airborne saliva and mucus particles. Have you never in your life had someone talking toward you and had some spit land on you? Have you ever been to a salad bar and seen a sneeze guard? Do you cover your mouth when you cough?
Particles spread a lot when forcefully exhaling, and not just when coughing or sneezing.
Yeah but my point was the claim that "wearing masks is highly effective" needs more qualifiers.
There are many kinds of masks and many different communicable diseases. A cloth mask will not block covid aerosol transmission at all, and covid is known to transmit via aerosol. A cloth mask may prevent some spread via droplets, but it's unclear if it's "highly effective" or just "marginally effective" or even "ineffective" given how often people touch and adjust cloth masks and how rarely people wash them.
Cloth masks had no statistically significant effect on the transmission of covid. There is good news though - a 20% increase in masking with surgical masks resulted in a 10% decrease in transmission.
You should consider cloth masks to be purely psychological protection.
That's not what the article says. The article says, "cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period"
The part about statistical significance says, "Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant."
The paper said that villages in Bangladesh that used the provided cloth masks did not have a statistically significant reduction in cases. This is not the same as saying cloth masks do not work; a cloth mask with higher filtration efficiency than was used in the study can be manufactured, but this was cost prohibitive compared to surgical masks. It was also not possible to procure one of the materials they wanted to use in the cloth masks; without it efficiency was only 37% instead of 60%. This was described in some detail in Appendix F.
These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings
and
In our internal testing, we found that cloth masks with an external layer made of Pellon 931 polyester fusible interface ironed onto interlocking knit with a middle layer of interlocking knit could achieve a 60% filtration efficiency. Upon discussions with the manufacturers, we learned that those materials could not be procured.
It may be theoretically possible to improve cloth masks, but the ones you see people wearing around here in California aren't that.
When we're talking about well-executed studies with N=350,000 I think the practical conclusion is pretty obvious. This is not an underpowered study. The effect size was tiny.
You are coming to this article with your own biases. You seem to be basing your analysis that we "know" masking is highly effective. That is not true. The evidence used to justify this policy is low quality(don't you remember the CDC hair salon study) and dependent on the precautionary principle. High quality evidence on masking has either low effect sizes or is inconclusive. It is certainly not settled science.
I am completely aware of that study. That study is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my comment. The effect sizes were barely significant. Not all groups managed any effect of significance. There are biases, confounding factors and limitations of that study. Those results are not the slam dunk you think they are. I implore you to read the study carefully.
According to the study itself, the evidence is _not_ clear:
> Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all
I'm not cherry picking. This whole thread is related to mask mandates. No one is mandating N95 masks. All the discussion around masks in this context is about cloth masks.
Even if it was related to masks in general, very few people are wearing N95 masks for protection. Cloth masks are far more relevant.
You're making a mistake by drawing conclusions that masks aren't effective. Pointing to one study which has non-significant data means you shouldn't draw any conclusion at all from it.
I'm not drawing conclusions from that study, I'm pointing out that the study which the OP used to say "the science is pretty clear" and "the evidence is clear" does not reach the same conclusion as OP.
Your comment should really be directed at the OP, not me.
You took ONE study and your claim is that the science is not clear on masks. You used that study as evidence for your conclusion. That is not how science works. One study not having enough data to support the hypothesis doesn't mean that the hypothesis is wrong or that ALL studies are unclear.
We do know masks prevent the spread disease. Look in any Operating Room. If masking by the general public is shown to be ineffective, that only argues for further education on how to mask properly.
I see the "surgeons use masks in operating rooms, this proves public masking prevents the spread of COVID" argument nearly every time a mask debate appears on this site or others, and it just seems so...obviously fallacious and absurd to me on a dozen different levels, that I almost feel like I'm missing some fundamental point about it.
The point is that masks are obviously effective. It requires a lot of mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that masks are not effective despite the overwhelming evidence in support of masks. Even the Reason article admits that masks are effective despite its misleading headline that suggests masks are not effective.
I would like you to consider the possibility that the evidence in favor of masks is probably overwhelming as you might believe. The studies that have been done have so many cofounders as to be flawed at best, useless at worst. The "overwhelming evidence" line not even consistent with the studies that do strongly support maskin.
In addition, the arguments have become political/partisan which muddies discussion (i.e. even if you or I had a study that proved it 100% beyond a shadow of doubt, many people would refuse to believe it nonetheless), and in general even though I personally believe that masks are effective at slowing down the spread of covid, I don't believe it particularly strongly and my belief has a lot of qualifiers to it. The phrase "overwhelming evidence in support of masks" overstates your point.
You are obviously conflating the use of surgical masks in operating rooms that are for stopping droplets with using masks to stop a respiratory airborne virus. How can this possibly be the basis of your argument? It's utter nonsense.
Simple observation: The huge difference in infection rates between Democratic and Republican areas--far more than can be accounted for by the vaccination rate. That says behavior (masks + distancing) is definitely a substantial factor.
Also note the much smaller effect of mask mandates--it's compliance that matters, not merely the rules.
Florida has been the media whipping boy for the entire pandemic, and yet here we are almost 2 years in and their infection rates are on par with the states that had the most restrictions.
That article linked to this article https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
on a controlled randomized study that claims "Mask distribution and promotion was a scalable and effective method to reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections."
I assume merpnderp understands perfectly well which article you were talking about.
You said:
>But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don't say masking is effective, they continually question if it is.
There are five parts of the article that contain the word "mask":
1. On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.
2. "You can't learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study," Jonathan Ketcham, a public-health economist at Arizona State University, told me.
3. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the CDC—which showed a dramatic more-than-tripling of risk for unmasked students—ought to be excluded from this debate.
4. For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question. Any public official—including and especially Walensky—who purports to follow the science should toss this one in the trash.
5. Hopefully, we see something similar [death rate not rising in DC despite a spike in cases, as with delta] with omicron, though everyone should prepare for Democratic officials to bring back mask mandates (and maybe lockdowns) in response to rising cases. Mayor Muriel Bowser will probably reinstate D.C.'s mask mandate—just as soon as her own holiday parties are over.
None of these are, as you claimed, "continuously questioning if wearing masks is effective". (1) describes the study that is the subject of the article. (2), (3) and (4) are specifically saying, exactly as the submitted article describes, that they don't think wearing masks is ineffective, just that this study doesn't prove that they are effective. (5) is just saying people should expect masks to become mandatory again for everyone soon.
(And to be clear, the parts of the article that I didn't quote above don't question the effectiveness of masks either. In fact, the part about college campuses being closed due to omicron specifically points out that vaccines have not been sufficient to prevent that from happening.)
You're welcome to say that you think the article's title is suggestive of something the article doesn't claim. I happen to agree; I think it's clickbait. But your points about the content of the article are unfounded.
If we question the motive or even the eventual consequence of an article but not the truth, that’s NOT fact-checking anymore but purely intention-checking, whose intention and what the hell it might be. At least at that point, “fact-checking” is becoming a propaganda machine, no more, no less. Communist countries have even “security law” to put people in jail based purely on intention and eventual consequences.
Btw, the “fact-checker” labeled the article as “false information”, not as “misleading”.
The Reason article makes perfectly clear that masks are very effective and should be worn in school. It's then totally dishonest for the article to have that headline which seemingly questions the effectiveness of masks. The author knew what they were doing.
Your very statement of "which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). " is misleading
As both this story, and the "fact checked" story (as well as the position of many others) is not really talking about masks at the physics level (though new data about omicron is placing that in question now as well) but masking as a POLICY
it may be true that masks themselves are effective, but due to human nature masking POLICIES, including masking POLICIES in schools are not. Human interactions with the mask have we have seen countless times are far far far from perfect, people pulling on the masks, masks around chins, removing the mask to cough or sneeze, etc. Children will be even less disciplined
So I dont think they are questioning the mask as a technical barrier to stop covid, they are questioning the masks as a public policy given that humans are involved
But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don't say masking is effective, they continually question if it is. This is really problematic. The study being wrong doesn't question _if_ masking is effective, but _how_ effective. There's a major difference in these statements and they can have readers, who are not experts and don't know scientific vernacular, to doubt and distrust more science than the article _technically_ draws into question. The article is suggesting that this is the norm and because this study is bad we get to question all the others.
So the problem here really is that while yes, the article only questions the one study they do so in a way that questions more fundamental knowledge that we have. Masking works. How much? Harder to say. There's a few old sayings such as "the devil never tells a full lie" or "the devil sows doubt" (often with truth). These are the errors that the authors are making here.
I would conclude that they aren't inaccurate, but are misleading.