The case against masks at school

Post by standardUser » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #131

spookthesunset wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For two years we’ve been asked to park our problems and to act like literally all that matters is the spread of Covid. Nothing else matters. Just a myopic fixation on the spread of one highly infectious respiratory virus. Even a year after vaccines we are still being asked to treat Covid like it is the #1 priority in our lives. More important than our well being, our mental health, our communities, our children, or a…

Well put. I’m a 29 year old male who moved to a new city right before covid and my life has basically been put on hold for two years now with my only access to meeting potential partners being Tinder (or bars, I suppose.) All the activities I try to join (other than my BJJ classes) are remote. Chess club is remote (might as well just play chess.com) my bipolar support group is remote, etc.

Post by jimmyjazz14 » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #435

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the whole point of the article that school mask mandates probably don't reduce spread? If it doesn't reduce spread than it won't help your overwhelmed friends working in medicine. Sorry I guess I just don't understand what point you are trying to make.

The thesis of the article is that even though studies show masks work studies in schools had obvious flaws and are measuring multiple confounding factors ergo masks might not work so we have no justification for mask mandates. This is materially different from knowing they don't work. I cannot countenance the idea that keeping most of your spit with you rather than floating around the room doesn't reduce spread of a…

Post by JangoSteve » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #244

docfort wrote: post #96

This argument is poorly constructed. I think there could be better ones, but here’s my problem. It goes through the three CDC studies and correctly observes that they fail to separate regions that have high vaccination rates from schools without a mask mandate. Indeed, the ideal experiment would involve two schools that are otherwise identical in the same geographical area with high vaccination rates: one that has no…

A randomized study was run in Bangladesh. There they handed out masks to randomly selected villages among a pool of 600 villages with similar vaccination and political stances. That study showed that the effect of surgical masks was statistically significant when used by the elderly 50+ population. For other age groups and for cloth masks, the advantage was statistically insignificant. All the headlines around this s…

    We found clear evidence that surgical masks are effective in reducing symptomatic seropreva-
    lence of SARS-CoV-2. While cloth masks clearly reduce symptoms, we find less clear evidence of
    their impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections, with the statistical significance depending
    on whether we impute missing values for non-consenting adults. The number of cloth mask vil-
    lages (100) was half that for surgical masks (200), meaning that our results tend to be less precise.

Post by baron816 » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #456

baron816 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My daughter is in pre-med. Apparently people are dropping out like flies This may not be a bad thing in the long run. There’s a shortage of medical professionals because the medical industry wants it that way. If the crisis becomes acute enough, the government will be forced to loosen regulations, and that would allow for more people to enter the field faster and more easily.

_thats_ your takeaway? that if the damn government stopped bothering to try to oversee outcomes in an area with extreme information asymmetry, a desire to get treated regardless of the cost, a bunch of agents between the doctor and the patient taking their cut, and a massive problem with cost control....everything would just be fine and we'd have plenty of doctors.

Post by mattmiller » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC