Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

maskssavelives.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#21

Post by dgrin91 »

jMyles wrote: post #17
dgrin91 wrote: post #6

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way. For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture". And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

> And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped. This seems an odd way to summarize your point. SK and Japan didn't do lockdowns, and yet fared better than any country that did.

My point is not about the effectiveness of lockdowns. Its about the effectiveness of masks. All 3 of those countries used masks, and I would guess China's use shot up to high once things started exploding. Based on infection numbers its not clear that masks actually had impact.

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#22

Post by svara »

dgrin91 wrote: post #6

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way. For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture". And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

When you have a correlation plus a plausible mechanism for causation, it's not appropriate to invoke "correlation is not causation". It's literally true, but distracting. That's where you do additional studies.

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#23

Post by virgilp »

dgrin91 wrote: post #6

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way. For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture". And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

Well, for one, it's insane to say "masks don't help" in the same phrase where you say "we need them for the medical staff". Which one is it?

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#25

Post by jpatrickpark »

Japan has low number of confirmed cases because they barely tested anyone. For example, from Feb 1st to March 18th, Japan had over 160k people who wanted to get tested, and they tested only about 5k people among them (news.bizwatch.co.kr/article/industry/2020/03/23/0001).

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#26

Post by dgrin91 »

virgilp wrote: post #23
dgrin91 wrote: post #6

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way. For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture". And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

Well, for one, it's insane to say "masks don't help" in the same phrase where you say "we need them for the medical staff". Which one is it?

I think the key phrase in that tweet was "general public". Medical professionals who are in close contact for many hours of the day, day after day, do not count as general public.

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#27

Post by svara »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #12
dgrin91 wrote: post #6

Isn't this the epitome of causation vs correlation? I'm not saying masks don't help, but this site doesn't say or link to why masks are the way. For example, Japan has over double the population of SK, yet SK has ~9x more cases. Yet both are "high mask-wearing culture". And of course, China, which is "medium", breaks this model heavily. Masks didn't help. Lockdowns helped.

I totally agree that this is nothing more than correlation at this point. I'm all for a double-blind study and would love to better quantify mask-wearing. I am saying: wearing masks seems like an easy thing to do that could potentially limit the COVID-19 infection rate.

That's nonsense. How are you going to blind people to whether they're wearing a mask or not? There's already a lot of evidence supporting the use of mask to protect the wearer and to protect transmission of infection from the wearer ("source control") both in healthcare and in community settings.

We wrote a sort of mini-review on this recently: https://medium.com/@matthiassamwald/promoting-simple-do-it-y...

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#28

Post by spqr0a1 »

Meanwhile in New York, the worst hit state in America, masks of all sorts have been illegal in public for the last 175 years. https://newyorkhistoryblog.org/2013/10/halloween-history-new... https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/240.35

Re: Show HN: Japan's mask culture saves lives. The West needs to adopt mask culture

#29

Post by svara »

mbreese wrote: post #18
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree that this is nothing more than correlation at this point. I'm all for a double-blind study and would love to better quantify mask-wearing. I am saying: wearing masks seems like an easy thing to do that could potentially limit the COVID-19 infection rate.

And it could also give people a false sense of security. Masks may be helpful, but only in concert with other practices. Distancing is going to have a much larger impact on limiting the viral spread. If you have a bunch of people wearing masks that are only partially effective start gathering in large groups, you run the risk of negating all of the good generated from distancing.

The "false sense of security" point needs evidence the same way that we need evidence on whether masks are beneficial or not. There's evidence for the latter, and, to the best of my knowledge, only speculation on the former point.

Either way, no one is advocating for mask wearing to replace other mitigation measures.

Post reply on HN