Earlier quoted context omitted.
and all the halfway measures we've taken haven't achieved their stated goals. You have some good points up until this one. Go to your local hospital and ask them how they'd like it if their case load went up by 2x due to a lack of "halfway measures." In some places, that will be OK, while in others, it will be utterly catastrophic. Obviously that doesn't justify ridiculous overreactions to unmasked toddlers, as you p…
According to the article, in the only large randomized studies that have been performed, masking showed little, if any benefit. As far as I'm aware, most studies, including WHO, show that lockdowns were counter productive, and could result in increased transmission. I haven't seen a single study that showed school closures resulted in any decrease in transmission, or provided any benefit. I have seen many that showed…
From the first one [1] they linked:
> odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23] … Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection. …
Sounds like the issue is lack of statistical power. We basically can't conclude much at all from that study, but taken "at face value", that was an ~18% reduction in transmission. Presumably this would compound if done for longer or among more people due to exponential spread.
Compound an 18% reduction for three generations (about ~15 days) of viral spread and that's about a 45% reduction in case load. Of course it's more complicated than that because a faster-spreading virus will also reach saturation of the susceptible population more quickly, but it does mean lowering peak hospital load, as well as lowering R_0 which means the point of saturation is smaller, etc.
From the second one [2] they linked:
> Proper mask-wearing increased from 13.3% in the control group to 42.3% in the intervention arm (adjusted percentage point difference = 0.29 [0.26, 0.31]). The intervention reduced symptomatic seroprevalence (adjusted prevalence ratio (aPR) = 0.91 [0.82, 1.00])
So that's a 9% reduction (again, with a wide confidence interval), as a result of increasing mask usage by only 29 percentage points. So if the signal's real, then presumably increasing mask usage further, say up to 85%, would add a very meaningful further reduction.
Again, we can assume that would compound if done for longer or among a larger population.
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Furthermore, there have been plenty of lab experiments on masks which show them to be effective at filtering water droplet-bound Covid particles. And Covid is not the first virus we've ever encountered. In the absence of lots of data specific to Covid, we can apply background scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of masks in slowing the spread of respiratory disease.
There are also costs to wearing masks, as well as to mask mandates, which I'm not taking into account in this post. But I wouldn't characterize the evidence as you have.
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[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M20-6817
[2] https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-...