Mask podcast today at noon/3 eastern! All the tools you need to fight the insanity.
Our good friend and colleague Josh Stevenson (@IfIHadAStick) has been doing some incredible work. Recently, he regurgitated a decent list of studies about masks. If anyone asks you the evidence on why masks don’t work - here’s another resource for you!
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Annals of Internal Medicine: "Therefore, evidence for mask use versus nonuse and comparing masks types in health care settings remained insufficient"
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/L20-1292Annals of Internal Medicine: "The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates"
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817`Cochrane Library: "There is moderate certainty evidence that wearing a mask probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza compared to not wearing a mask"
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub5/full"In intention-to-treat analysis, facemask use was neither effective against laboratory-confirmed vRTIs, nor against CRI, not even in per-protocol analysis."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3349234"However, overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/"No evidence was identified that examined a potential role for surgical face masks in protecting staff from infectious material encountered in the operating room."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK195765/Southern Medical Journal: "There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8395971/Covid advisor ""What we're worried about is people getting exposed and getting infected while thinking they were actually doing something to protect themselves,"
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/11/confronting-notion-face-masks-reduce-covid-dose"Making pre-school children wear masks is bad public health"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666535221001221#"the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34591895/"Use of face masks is not recommended in schools in Norway."
https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.26.1.2002011"The main insight of the present research is that face masks’ use influences emotion inference from faces for all ages and especially for toddlers."
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.669432/full
More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms
https://drtrozzi.org/2021/12/21/more-than-150-comparative-studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
This is another study I never see cited, and it's from the CDC's MMWR: "state-issued mask mandates were associated with a 0.5-1.8% decrease in COVID-19 cases 1-100 days after implementation and a 0.7-1.9% decrease in COVID deaths 1-100 days after implementation." So, gains, maybe, but extremely marginal. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7010e3-H.pdf