Do masks prevent transmission of COVID-19? Yes, reports the New York Times’ David Leonhardt — in the laboratory. In the real world, no data definitively establishes effectiveness of masking, and especially of mask mandates. The difference matters, Leonhardt warns, because upticks in transmission and hospitalization will likely have policymakers reverting back to mask mandates even though there is no data that shows an impact on either:
Masks reduce the spread of the Covid virus by preventing virus particles from traveling from one person’s nose or mouth into the air and infecting another person. Laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated the effect.
Given this, you would think that communities where mask-wearing has been more common would have had many fewer Covid infections. But that hasn’t been the case.
In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.
Advocates of mandates sometimes argue that they do have a big effect even if it is not evident in population-wide data, because of how many other factors are at play. But this argument seems unpersuasive.
Not only is the argument unpersuasive, it argues against clearly demonstrated effects from other strategies. Most notably, vaccination rates have a clear and consistent impact on deaths and severely acute cases, a trend which started obviously when vaccines became widely available. But even after the majority of the population had been vaccinated — and more exposed — mask mandates didn’t show any significant impact:
After all, the effect of vaccines on severe illness is blazingly obvious in the geographic data: Places with higher vaccination rates have suffered many fewer Covid deaths. The patterns are clear even though the world is a messy place, with many factors other than vaccines influencing Covid death rates.
Yet when you look at the data on mask-wearing — both before vaccines were available and after, as well as both in the U.S. and abroad — you struggle to see any patterns.
Even the idea that hospitalizations are ticking up is somewhat suspect. The CDC still does not distinguish between COVID-correlated admissions and deaths and COVID-caused admissions and deaths. Four months ago, the CDC belatedly announced an effort to refine reporting systems to distinguish between the two, but they still lump both together. That’s an even bigger problem than two years ago, thanks to variants which are much less likely to produce seriously acute COVID-19 cases......... To Read More....
The Latest Mask Research Is Bad News For Branch Covidians - Scott Morefield, June 13, 2022- Unless you’re visiting a medical facility still taken in by the mask-cult or you live in a big city or some obscure California county run by hypochondriac Democrat whack-jobs, you’re probably generally living your life without being forced to wear a useless, bacteria-laden piece of t-shirt material over your face. However, if your overlords have gone out of their way to clarify that mask mandates have only been lifted because Covid rates have gone down or even that recent iterations of the virus have become less deadly, they are purposefully missing the overall picture and slyly holding on to the pretext that will invite the insanity back at any point - that masks “work” to stop or curb the spread of highly contagious respiratory viruses.
They don’t, obviously, but their rigid belief system is not surprising. Belief in the power and efficacy of face masks has become a de facto religion to these cultist nutjobs, and they’re just itching for the next opportunity to impose their ‘faith’ on the rest of us. If you think I’m exaggerating, consider that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) just recommended masking while traveling again based on the spread of … monkeypox. That’s right, that piece of cloth over your face is so magical that everyone must now wear one to ‘protect’ against a virus that so far mainly has spread at gay nightclubs via direct contact with the open pustules of infected people..........
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