[DanBC]

There is a lot of work on respiratory viruses and masks, and none of the RCTs can find a benefit of wearing masks.

> No one has studied masks on this specific strain? It's new for crying out loud.

Yes they have. Here's one where they take four patients who have covid-19 and fit them with masks and ask them to cough onto petri dishes. They find covid outside the masks.

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1342

[dougmany]

It is interesting that the cotton masks were more effective than the surgical mask:

>The median viral loads after coughs without a mask, with a surgical mask, and with a cotton mask were 2.56 log copies/mL, 2.42 log copies/mL, and 1.85 log copies/mL, respectively

My point was that if the statement read Scientific evidence shows masks are not effective it would means something. The lack of evidence showing effectiveness does not disprove effectiveness.

[ceejayoz]

"This article has been retracted. See Notice of Retraction."

Yeah, maybe don't go around citing that one.

[themaninthedark]

This was binary test. It looks like they were testing if Covid-19 passed through masks or not. They did not look at N95 masks, nor did they look at seeing if the viral load was decreased.

"This experiment did not include N95 masks and does not reflect the actual transmission of infection from patients with COVID-19 wearing different types of masks. We do not know whether masks shorten the travel distance of droplets during coughing. Further study is needed to recommend whether face masks decrease transmission of virus from asymptomatic individuals or those with suspected COVID-19 who are not coughing."

[jdc]

Looks like the authors retracted this one!