I never truly understood the anti-mask sentiment and I think I never will

submitted by RichardsonDavis from self.AskSaidIt

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[–]noice 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Thanks for posting that. Seems like a pretty well thought out review. At the same time, I know how the sausage is made in academia, so critical thinking and a discerning eye are crucial to ingesting these things.

An aside, calling people in this thread idiots for having different opinions is unnecessary. If anything, we are all idiots including yourself and myself, because we are humans that are invariably flawed.

If COVID19 does not spread by fomites (which we now know it does not), then touching of face & mask, or improper hand hygiene should have very minimal effect. You've probably noticed that most of the review's evidence purporting a positive effect combines mask wearing with hand hygiene in an influenza context. In contrast to COVID, influenza does actually spread by fomites. So this information doesn't help much with the thing we want to know: do masks themselves have a positive effect at reducing spread of COVID. We seem to have both picked out the study that looked at comparing spread during "mask on" vs "mask off" times as a potentially critical study for answering this question. I will look into this tomorrow with a critical eye to make a determination on that piece of evidence. Are there others that you find compelling? I may investigate those as well.

I did look into the McIntyre review toward the start of the pandemic (this review echoes their statements & recommendations), and found the evidence behind their conclusions to be laughably flimsy. This review appears to be more intellectually honest, but I am left still looking for evidence that is compelling.

[–]Insider 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

An aside, calling people in this thread idiots for having different opinions is unnecessary. If anything, we are all idiots including yourself and myself, because we are humans that are invariably flawed.

True, we're all idiots, some more idiotic than others, like the racists in this site constantly harping on blacks and Jews. Some here could be government agents purposefully spreading idiocy. You seem like you actually read and logically dissect content, which is different from most users.

If COVID19 does not spread by fomites (which we now know it does not)

From what I've read, it's possible for COVID to spread through fomites, just less likely and not the main way it spreads.

The CDC have a lot of links: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-research/surface-transmission.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

We also have to consider whether the risk of influenza transmission through surface or hand-fomites is large as well. This study seems to indicate that the direct route is more significant for influenza transmission than the hand-fomite route:

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-018-3425-x

Are there others that you find compelling? I may investigate those as well.

I skimmed through the research pretty quickly. Some studies were based on influenza, some on COVID.

Imo, there are a few main points that need to be determined atm, which is whether mask-wearing lowers the risk of spread through water droplets (which it likely does). Then you need to determine whether this even matters based on transmission rate through aerosols. If aerosol transmission is too high and masks don't help at all in this department, then masks may be useless.

There are a ton of relevant studies on this, but there are too many factors that play in. Different levels of ventilation, social proximity, participant compliance, proper mask wearing, type/material of mask used, fit of the mask, etc.

This simulation is pretty interesting as well, it shows that all masks are somewhat effective, even in preventing transmission of aerosols, but none of the masks were 100% fullproof:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33087517/

full article: https://sci-hub.st/downloads/2020-10-22/c4/10.1128@mSphere.00637-20.pdf