I am not stopping a defense of the Cochrane review. It’s the best current study we have and it announces that it’s not clear if masks work. If we don’t know if they work, why should governments keep mandating them? They shouldn’t. Full stop.
Regarding Japan, here’s an article by the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/japan-covid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare they talk about Japan’s success. Notice how masks do not feature heavily in the article.
Here’s another one that places your claim in doubt: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/japan-covid-19-pandemic-response-restrictions-two-years
Finally, the total number of deaths in Japan and the US differ widely in large part because the two populations are, broadly, very different. COVID disproportionately effects overweight people. Ask anyone that worked in the hospitals during peak waves. The simple fact is that fat people don’t do well with Covid. Now ask yourself, is there an equal number of overweight people (%) in Japan to the US? No. People in Japan are far less overweight than people in the US. It’s no wonder, therefore, that the US fared worse because it’s population is move overweight.
I am extremely confused as to what you intended to prove with those two links. Masks were not mentioned by either, the second link barely discussed Covid and seemed to focus on foreign relations, and both agreed Japan’s response was a success, which contradicts your implication that it somehow wasn’t. And the first guy says he was supportive of the government’s guidelines, which included masks. So unless there’s something else against masks that he said, I’m gonna extrapolate that he is not anti-mask.
Ok, I’m gonna just skip over the whole blaming overweight people part and ask you - do you believe overweight people are more likely to spread Covid? Because we’re discussing spread, do masks work to combat spread. Japan had lower deaths but they also had lower cases. Was it also due to overweight people that Covid cases, not deaths, were higher in the usa. And maybe a lower case load has something to do with the lower deaths in Japan, more than overweight people. Japan’s mask usage was always extremely high, even without a mandate, and remains so.
And if you want to continue the Cochrane stuff-it’s not a study. It’s a meta analysis of a bunch of studies, all of which were pretty well-known prior to the Cochrane study, and the problems with them were already recognized by those studies’ authors. So the Cochrane study just lumps a bunch of poor quality studies into one poor quality meta analysis that even the Cochrane study authors write is inconclusive and probably would not have made the splash it has if it was not done by a bunch of brownstone institute anti-maskers who decided to go on a press tour saying their study said something that it didn’t.
Not to mention we have mechanical filtration studies proving the physics of mask wearing, so unless there’s something mystical about Covid, these studies still apply.
The point of those links is to show that masks are not the answer.
Ultimately, we are concerned about COVID causing deaths and serious harm. It does this for overweight people. Other people don’t suffer nearly as badly and COVID typically presents as a mild to mid level cold or flu. Consequently, it’s really not as big of a deal as we’ve been making it out to be.
COVID sucked mostly because of poor policy. I lived in a Canadian city with a strict masking policy and high compliance. The spread of COVID was massive. The hospitals in Canada were full and fucked way before Covid, so a few extra admissions completely broke their fucked up system.
I’m no longer convinced the whole world had to shut down and mask up. COVID policy fucked over the economy and people’s’ well-being. It has especially negatively effected those most in need.
Ultimately, I think people should wear masks if it makes them comfortable. I find masks to be uncomfortable, ugly, and ultimately anti-human, because I think the face is an important part of humans. Some people don’t seem to think this, however, so I understand I might be among a minority.
Finally, isolated physical tests on masks don’t represent well what happens in the real world. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell wasn’t hermetically sealing the masks to my face and I didn’t see anyone else doing it either. The real-world usage simply wasn’t effective. It was political.
yeah, and I’m asking you how those links show that masks are not the answer. They don’t even mention masks once. If you’re telling me masks are not the only answer, then I agree. But masks are part of the answer.
Yes we are concerned about stopping deaths from covid. How do we ensure that covid deaths do not happen - by stopping the spread. Again, skipping over the whole conversation about “overweight people,” I’m sure you agree it was not and was never only overweight people dying from covid. And even if it was, are you saying these people deserve to die? “Well, overweight people will die, but for everyone else it’s just the flu so we shouldn’t do anything.”
Except it was never only overweight people dying, and even those who got covid and it only presented as a “mild flu” have dealt with long post-viral illness afterwards. Some people still dealing with post-viral illness from being infected in the first wave. So you also have to decide that you’re okay with that.
I know nothing about Canada, but I don’t understand your reasoning.
The hospitals in Canada were full and fucked way before covid, so a few extra admissions completely broke their fucked up system.
Okay, so you blame masks and lockdowns for that? That’s exactly what lockdowns were supposed to mitigate - stop the spread so covid does not put more stress on an already overstressed system. We were dealing with the same thing here in the USA. So you admit covid stressed an overstressed system, but your solution is to…let covid spread more? Wouldn’t that put more stress on hospitals. Or, as you say, well it only presents a mild flu for some. Okay…then why did it put so much stress on the hospitals in 2020 if it’s not a big deal?
isolated physical tests on masks don’t represent well what happens in the real world.
Except those real world studies were all inconclusive. So we have mechanistic evidence that shows without a doubt that masks work, versus inconclusive rcts that need to be stretched by ideologues, beyond the conclusions of the authors, to maybe sort-of support that masks don’t work.
I sure as hell wasn’t hermetically sealing the masks to my face and I didn’t see anyone else doing it either.
I did not have a mask that fit my face until just before the omicron wave. This was not a failure of masks. I argued to someone here (maybe you) that any mask is better than no mask. However, yes, some masks are better than others and if you’re walking around in a loose fitting cloth mask you’re getting very little protection, especially when no one else is taking any precaution. But, at least here in the US, we were first told that masks were unnecessary, then told we should wear a cloth mask, and then finally the baggy blue surgical masks were promoted, which was better but still inadequate. I don’t know what it was like in Canada, but for us this was a failure of policy. There were contradictory statements, no real push to get people educated about masks, and of course poor masks were promoted. So you’d walk around seeing people wearing surgical masks below their nose, upside down. Then of course there was the issue where people were selling counterfeit masks, including n95s, that didn’t work, so you had people also walking around with fake masks. And of course the whole issue at the start of the pandemic where we had a shortage of PPE.
There were a whole lot of policy disasters, many of which predated covid, but to blame masks and make the charge that they don’t work because of those policy disasters makes no sense. Just in time manufacturing should never have been used to supply PPE, masks should have been promoted from the start (and “the start” should have been at least by early January, not March 15), and n95s should have been made easy to acquire with an education campaign to get people to wear them correctly. Instead we were all left on our own to try and sort through all the contradictory statements of the CDC and misinformation on the internet, fight with people at stores to even get a mask, do intensive research at home to figure out if your mask was even real, and then even once you did all that many people didn’t even understand how to wear them. When I got an n95 finally it was late 2021 and I was working in a nursery school. As kids and teachers wearing loose fitting masks that they were extremely lax with began dropping like flies, I was getting tested weekly (because I was constantly exposed) and never got covid once. Masks work.
