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Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

med.stanford.edu

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Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#31

Post by dragontamer »

majormajor wrote: post #28
dragontamer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of us got cloth masks with the full expectation that they were worse than proper PPE from hospitals (be it surgical masks or N95 masks). I'm not sure if people remember: but there was a shortage of masks of all kinds in March 2020. Cloth masks were the only thing we could get, and we all knew they were kind of crap (a lot of us were using coffee filters stapled onto the masks to increase its effectivenes…

Could you share a link for $1 N95's? That's better than I've seen. I've already moved to this approach myself, it's an increase in cost that I'll gladly take for increased protection. Just waiting for government and businesses in the US to catch up. It was definitely hard to find the good stuff at first - and I was much more reclusive as a result too - but yeah, things have changed. I wish people wouldn't respond to…

So $1 masks are only "Duckbill" masks, which look kind of stupid. But they're clearly low cost and have very high surface area / breathability. Also, real N95, so major benefit for sure.

https://accumed.com/30-pack-fda-cleared-niosh-n95-surgical-r...

These straps kinda suck though. I recommend carrying a few extras somewhere since the straps may snap throughout the day. I'm still looking for a better mask. For all of its faults, this one is available today and at the promised $1 price too.

The BNX duckbill masks used to be $1 per. But they seem sold out. Keep an eye on them just in case they come back into stock. https://bnx.com/products/bnx-50-pack-n95-mask-respirator-nio...

The Kimtech 53358 Duckbill WAS $1 each just a month ago. But their prices suddenly skyrocketed to $1.50ish from most sources. EDIT: If you buy 300 of them, you should get close to the $1/each price, but I want to "test" them before dropping $300 buckaroos on it...

EDIT: WB Mason is selling the Kimtech Duckbills at $50 per 50-pack, so that's $1 each: https://www.wbmason.com/ProductDetail.aspx?ItemDesc=Kimtech-...

-----------

I'm not sure how much I trust Amazon's supply chain for proper N95 / NIOSH approved products. A lot of Amazon's stuff are 3rd party shippers and/or 3rd party suppliers instead of official sources, and comingling is an issue.

If its $1.50 from a proper medical store, then the $0.80 price at Amazon is probably too good to be true. If we're paying extra for the N95 rating, I'm willing to pay extra for proper supply chain.

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#32

Post by logicalmonster »

douglasisshiny wrote: post #13
exabrial wrote: post #6

This is truly great news, as we've need some controlled studies. However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. I think the best solution is improved mandates for airflow. It's a lot easier to improve airflow in a building than it is to police and enforce a mask mandate.

>However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. Maybe I'm missing something, but is this actually a thing? Who in the mainstream proposing police violence, bodily or financial harm? The worst I've heard (in the U.S.) is that a business may not allow you to enter if you're not wearing a mask, which is well within their right and reasona…

> Who in the mainstream proposing police violence, bodily or financial harm?

People with some flavor of libertarian viewpoint have often explained how every piece of legislation is ultimately backed up by physical force from police officers. Ultimately, if you violate any government policy: whether it is taxation, opening up an illegal lemonade stand, or trying to attend a restaurant that has a vaccine mandate imposed on it, it is ultimately physical force that backs this up if compliance is refused.

As far as financial harm: see the government strongly encouraging corporations to mandate vaccines or other similar policies.

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#33

Post by rafaelero »

chitowneats wrote: post #4

From Martin Kulldorff, esteemed (though contrarian) Harvard Med epidemiologist: "Odd that mask advocates are excited by this study. As a vaccine advocate, I would be horrified if a vaccine trial showed 11% efficacy. Based on the 95% confidence intervals, we do not even know if surgical mask efficacy is more than 0%." https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/14332026511062016...

Is this guy serious? It was not a split between 100% of group A using masks and 0% of group B using it. It was more like 40% / 15%. Is it that easy to become a tenure in Harvard? I think I am applying.

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#34

Post by learc83 »

douglasisshiny wrote: post #13
exabrial wrote: post #6

This is truly great news, as we've need some controlled studies. However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. I think the best solution is improved mandates for airflow. It's a lot easier to improve airflow in a building than it is to police and enforce a mask mandate.

>However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. Maybe I'm missing something, but is this actually a thing? Who in the mainstream proposing police violence, bodily or financial harm? The worst I've heard (in the U.S.) is that a business may not allow you to enter if you're not wearing a mask, which is well within their right and reasona…

Libertarians like to make this argument about any government enforcement action.

If the government tells you that you can't play loud music after 10pm and you do it anyway, eventually someone will issue you a citation. If you refuse to pay that, eventually you'll get a court summons. If you fail to appear, eventually a police officer may arrest you. If you resist, they will use force to make you comply.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but it is a standard libertarian/objectivist "gotcha".

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#35

Post by rhn_mk1 »

douglasisshiny wrote: post #13
exabrial wrote: post #6

This is truly great news, as we've need some controlled studies. However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. I think the best solution is improved mandates for airflow. It's a lot easier to improve airflow in a building than it is to police and enforce a mask mandate.

>However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. Maybe I'm missing something, but is this actually a thing? Who in the mainstream proposing police violence, bodily or financial harm? The worst I've heard (in the U.S.) is that a business may not allow you to enter if you're not wearing a mask, which is well within their right and reasona…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53934952

> A minimum €50 (£45) fine will be slapped on anyone breaking rules on face coverings - in shops, public transport or elsewhere

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#36

Post by GeekyBear »

Cloth masks are quite effective against viruses with a droplet based spread. Widespread mask use came as close to wiping out last year's Flu season as we've ever seen.

>Amid COVID-19 pandemic, flu has disappeared in the US

NEW YORK (AP) — February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.

Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve had on record,” according to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

https://apnews.com/article/flu-has-disappeared-us-pandemic-2...

However, during the same period where the Flu disappeared, there was a massive Covid surge, because cloth masks are not an effective means of filtering an airborne virus from the air you breathe.

Here's one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory board being interviewed on PBS.

>Studies that have been done show that if an individual might get infected within 15 minutes in a room, by time and concentration of the virus in the room, add a face cloth covering you only get about five more minutes of protection.

On the other hand if you use the n95 respirators and fit them tight to your face, you can actually spend 25 hours in that same room and still be protected.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

To get the kind of protection people imagine that cloth masks provide, you have to wear the same sort of masks that medical professionals are required to wear while treating patients who have an airborne virus.

Which is not surprising since we know Covid is fully airborne.

Unfortunately, those of us on the left have rejected this news in the same way that the crowd at a Trump rally rejected Trump when he told them that they should get vaccinated.

Cloth masks are not an adequate substitute for vaccination, especially for children too young to be vaccinated who are now expected to attend full school days.

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#37

Post by kragen »

douglasisshiny wrote: post #13
exabrial wrote: post #6

This is truly great news, as we've need some controlled studies. However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. I think the best solution is improved mandates for airflow. It's a lot easier to improve airflow in a building than it is to police and enforce a mask mandate.

>However, _mandates_, literally threatening people with police violence, bodily or financial harm, is not the correct way forward. Maybe I'm missing something, but is this actually a thing? Who in the mainstream proposing police violence, bodily or financial harm? The worst I've heard (in the U.S.) is that a business may not allow you to enter if you're not wearing a mask, which is well within their right and reasona…

This is officially government policy in the PRC, as well as many other places.

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#38

Post by treis »

cfn wrote: post #14

Here is the paper (or one of them, it is not clear after so many links): https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati... Bottom line: "The proportion of individuals with COVID-like symptoms was 7.62% (N=13,273) in the intervention arm and 8.62% (N=13,893) in the control arm. Blood samples were collected from N=10,952 consenting, symptomatic individuals. Adjusting for baseline covariates, the 2 interve…

This is a pretty modest impact, a short duration, and is somewhat clouded by it not being a double blind study.

The rate of infection at 7.62% vs 8.62% are particularly troublesome. As a comparison, it's estimated that 1/3-1/2 of Americans have been infected with Covid.

It's an open question of what the end game would be. Could be that both groups would end at the same infection rate. The masked group might just take longer to get there.

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#39

Post by kragen »

dragontamer wrote: post #2

> The researchers enrolled nearly 350,000 people from 600 villages in rural Bangladesh Wow. I was about to complain about "small n", but... an experiment of this size is not small at all. Congrats on the researchers on doing such a big study!

Maybe the relevant point is that it needed to be this big to get a P-value of less than .05, since they only got .04 even with 350,000 people. This is dramatically less effectiveness than I was expecting when I was pushing for mask mandates last year, and within a few months it was obvious that masks alone weren't having the large effect I had hoped for. Now we have quantitative estimates of how small the effect was (disappointingly small) and when it worked (cloth masks had almost no effect).

Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows

#40

Post by toomim »

majormajor wrote: post #28
dragontamer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of us got cloth masks with the full expectation that they were worse than proper PPE from hospitals (be it surgical masks or N95 masks). I'm not sure if people remember: but there was a shortage of masks of all kinds in March 2020. Cloth masks were the only thing we could get, and we all knew they were kind of crap (a lot of us were using coffee filters stapled onto the masks to increase its effectivenes…

Could you share a link for $1 N95's? That's better than I've seen. I've already moved to this approach myself, it's an increase in cost that I'll gladly take for increased protection. Just waiting for government and businesses in the US to catch up. It was definitely hard to find the good stuff at first - and I was much more reclusive as a result too - but yeah, things have changed. I wish people wouldn't respond to…

You can get the awesome 3M Aura used in hospitals for $2.20. These are great: https://www.ebay.com/itm/224332977653?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DI...
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