Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Valectar 1774 days ago
> There is no study showing that masks slow the spread of sars-2 in a community

You say that, and yet "At least ten studies have confirmed the benefit of universal masking in community level analyses"

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

And the website goes on to list each of them, as well as a number of other studies relating to the effectiveness of masking.

1 comments

Those studies all have fundamental flaws. The basic problem is those are associative studies, which can’t separate the effects of masking from the normal curve of a viral epidemic.

You are right though I should have been much more specific than just “study”.

A question though: if masking is so great, why wouldn’t the health authorities have performed an actual RCT to conclusively prove they work? (We have one RCT for SARS-2 which showed no statistically significant effect on the primary endpoint)