[incrudible]

> Wear mask and stay indoors if possible

For all we know about transmission, you should stay outdoors, if possible. If this isn't possible, maximize ventilation. Limit contacts in general. Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

Please stop propagating this BS.

If someone positive coughs in your direction but wears an FFP2 mask on and so do you, then the chance of you getting infected is much lower. That's why it's mandatory in Austria and why healthcare workers wear them, not because it's fashionable but to limit the spread of airborne disease which COVID is one.

Granted, Austria failed to contain the spread of COVID, but not due to the FFP2 enforcement but mostly due to skeptics who refused vaccination, social distancing and other measures, plus lots of pointless and half-assed measures from the government that were more of a theater and were enforced too late in an attempt to not piss people off and not hurt the economy which turned into a self fulfilling prophecy and a negative feedback loop, creating more skeptics and more infectious in the long run.

[merpnderp]

"Please stop propagating this BS." At least in the US hardly anyone has or uses FFP2 level masks (N95 here) and the government has not promoted them (except on the last page of the CDC page on masks with half a sentence saying they're better). And the data on cloth masks does show their effectiveness is much lower than initially advertised.

If the parent was speaking about the US, then they weren't propagating BS, as hardly anyone speaks of N95's when talking about masks. I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.

[ChuckNorris89]

> I assume it is because the government ran a massive ad campaign to get people to not wear them in the beginning.

They said the the same thing in Europe, in order to prevent opportunists from scalping them and the general population from hoarding them, so the healthcare workers would have access to them.

IMHO, intentionally deceiving the population in order to save masks for healthcare workers was a terribly short sighted move which cause more long term damage to the credibility of the governments when they pushed for compulsory mask wearing after the supply caught up. They could have been upfront about it and use every possible legal and gray-area channel to secure mask supplies before they could fall into the hands of opportunists, but instead, they chose to lie about it and treat everyone like dumb kids hoping people would fall for it.

They did the same thing again when Israel announced the protection of the Pfizer vaccine is wailing and a third dose is needed but the EU governments said that's not needed, and then backtracking on that statement a few months later and now making it mandatory.

Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Yeah, this back-and-forth on the efficacy of masks and vaccines is exactly the ammunition Covid-deniers and anti-vaxxers needed and the useless governments just gave it to them on a silver platter.

[merpnderp]

The irony, at least in the US, is that the ad campaign against using N95 masks was completely unnecessary as they were diverted in the supply chain to hospitals and government. There were no masks to be had at the hardware store or retail goods.

This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.

[incrudible]

> This pandemic has shown our public health organizations are not very good at their jobs.

They don't abide by the first law of holes. If they stopped at that one "noble lie", maybe we'd be in a better place.

[dathinab]

More like:

> Wear mask and stay (in your) home.

As in no contact > contact outside > contact inside

Also assuming you are not in tight crowds outside or "outside but bad ventilated" areas (e.g. tends):

longer contact outside without mask > longer contact inside with mask

Not because masks don't work but because being outside has such a strong effect (assuming you are not in a crowded area, or some area which wrt. ventilation is only pseudo-outside or you stick very close to other persons outside of a crowd, or you insist to always be direct facing a person instead of being beside that person etc.)

Or in other words beside outside being good ventilated you also have often less chances to directly cough at the face of a person, as you e.g. walk besides a person when taking a walk and activities being less crowded and as such it's easier to cough in a direction where no one is close by.

It also means that there are good reasons to ware masks if you are in a crowded area outside, it's just most "outside activities" are not in very crowded areas and hence outside infection rates are way lower. We are also less outside then inside etc.

Or at least that is how I understand it.

[smallerfish]

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission.

False.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/

[timmf]

I do agree with all your points, except:

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission

They are an effective measure which has lead to significant decrease in infection rates.

There are of course parameters like the type of mask.

[mathverse]

How many people are even using those masks correctly? There's a lot of people going around with old and contaminated masks or wearing them improperly.

[ceejayoz]

"People aren't using them properly" is an argument for better education, not ditching the things.

[mathverse]

And I have mentioned ditching the things where? It's an argument for not "relying that much" on an unreliable use of such tool like masks.

[xphilter]

If masks didn’t work, surly we’d all have anecdotes of people catching covid while wearing a masks. I literally have not heard of a single story. Everyone I know who has caught covid was maskless (not even stories of people wearing masks poorly).

[dageshi]

I imagine they mean, avoid leaving home as much as possible.

[vaylian]

> Masks have a very modest impact on transmission

Do you have a source for that?

[incrudible]

The (to my knowledge) largest study on community transmission finds ~10% reduction:

https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...

There are many other studies that find no or modest reduction. We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness, especially when it comes to how the average person uses masks, versus how a health care professional.

[chimprich]

I had a quick scan of that paper and read

"The results in all specifications are the same: we estimate a roughly 9% decline in symptomatic seroprevalence in the treatment group (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00]) for a 29 percentage point increase in mask wearing over 8 weeks."

So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.

> We need to accept lower results as an upper bound to effectiveness

Why?

[incrudible]

> So when mask use increased 29%, symptom prevalence reduced by 9%? That doesn't seem quite the same argument as the one you're making.

It is a real word example. It's not an increase of 29%, it's an absolute difference of 29%. Specifically, mask wearing in the intervention villages was 42%, in the control 13%. That is, in a hypothetical village where mask wearing approaches 100%, you might expect something like a 20-30% reduction, assuming a linear correlation. Again, that's not the real world.

> Why?

If an intervention is effective, the effect needs to reproduce. If it doesn't, the larger effect likely occurred by chance. Publication bias promotes positive results and inhibits negative or null results.

You have the same problem with all these COVID drugs. Remdesivir appeared to have an effect in early trials, now it's proven useless. Molnupiravir was initially report to be 50% effective, now it's down to 30%. At the other end of the aisle, you see that Ivermectin has many small studies showing remarkable effectiveness, but the larger ones show little to no effect.

If you apply scientific standards, you must apply them across the board. You must not let wishful thinking guide your decisions.

[mrtesthah]

Certainly if you wear loose fitting cloth masks like most people I see; they need to be FFP2-rated or N95, tight-fitting, and sanitized (heat, ozone, or UVC, etc.) or replaced between uses.

Otherwise in general, they do work.

https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/do-face-masks-work-her...

[crimsoneer]

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068302

It's probably about a 10% reduction in incidence. Which I guess is quite modest in comparison to, say, vaccines.

[corinroyal]

Actually, a recent metastudy found that masking reduces transmission by 53%, which is huge. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20211118/mask-wearing-cuts-n...

[teekert]

"maximize ventilation", have you seen the gas prices lately ;)