Masks are so last week. It about vaccine now.

Quote:

---

[ol]

Yafang Cheng1

Nan Ma2

Christian Witt3,

Steffen Rapp4,

Philipp S. Wild4,

Meinrat O. Andreae1,5,6,

Ulrich Pschl1,

Hang Su7,1,*

[/ol][ol]

1Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, 55128 Mainz, Germany.

2Institute for Environmental and Climate Research, Jinan University, Guangzhou 511443, China.

3Department of Outpatient Pneumology and Institute of Physiology, Charit Universittsmedizin Berlin, Campus Charit Mitte, 10117 Berlin, Germany.

4University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 55131 Mainz, Germany.

5Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.

6Department of Geology and Geophysics, King Saud University, 11451 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

7State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Formation and Prevention of Urban Air Pollution Complex, Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, Shanghai 200233, China.

[/ol]

---

The only American affiliated author on that is from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I'll pass on pretty much all foreign "research" at this point.

Max Plank is a top 5 research university.

Also Science is the cream of the crop of journals

A new study published in Science today says upfront that randomized controlled trials have shown masks provide little to no benefit for respiratory viruses then goes on to create a model to show that masks work

You just can't make this shit up pic.twitter.com/pKUaET3OYY

— Eric (@IAmTheActualET) May 20, 2021

beerad12man said:

---

A new study published in Science today says upfront that randomized controlled trials have shown masks provide little to no benefit for respiratory viruses then goes on to create a model to show that masks work

You just can't make this shit up pic.twitter.com/pKUaET3OYY

— Eric (@IAmTheActualET) May 20, 2021

---

"You can't make this **** up"....

Unless there's two Chinese institutions included as authors (of which the 2nd author is listed as an equal contributor as the primary author) and we all know the CCP doesn't allow their citizens to publish unless the "information" aligns with CCP propaganda.

BTW - I could make a dataset say whatever I want with selective data transformations, careful model selection, and targeted statistical analysis.

AgResearch said:

---

Quote:

---

[ol]

Yafang Cheng1

Nan Ma2

Christian Witt3,

Steffen Rapp4,

Philipp S. Wild4,

Meinrat O. Andreae1,5,6,

Ulrich Pschl1,

Hang Su7,1,*

[/ol][ol]

1Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, 55128 Mainz, Germany.

2Institute for Environmental and Climate Research, Jinan University, Guangzhou 511443, China.

3Department of Outpatient Pneumology and Institute of Physiology, Charit Universittsmedizin Berlin, Campus Charit Mitte, 10117 Berlin, Germany.

4University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 55131 Mainz, Germany.

5Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.

6Department of Geology and Geophysics, King Saud University, 11451 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

7State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Formation and Prevention of Urban Air Pollution Complex, Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences, Shanghai 200233, China.

[/ol]

---

The only American affiliated author on that is from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I'll pass on pretty much all foreign "research" at this point

---

The CDC website claims masks don't limit spread for the flu I wonder why Covid is so different.

JB said:

---

Masks are so last week. It about vaccine now.

---

Absolutely.

Still it would be nice to know what worked and what didn't for next time. I kind of assume next time will be 100 years from now when we finally have flying cars, but still it would be good to know.

What this article tells me, is unfortunately kind of what I already knew. The physics of masks work fine. The psychology is the problem. If you make policy, what people actually do is way more important than what they could be doing.

The physics of mask work fine and suggest they should help. But what really helps is staying away from other people. We used masks as an excuse to "re-open" and make people think they had some control of the situation. Unfortunately they did have some control, which was to stay away from people. So we had society try to be normal but with stupid pieces of cloth strapped to their faces intermittently. And to no one's surprise, it didn't do anything.

So in a hospital setting, where disease potential is high, masks don't work. Now in the general population, where concentration of disease is much lower than a hospital, masks magically work.

That's not how science actually works. I hope you understand that.

AgResearch said:

---

So in a hospital setting, where disease potential is high, masks don't work. Now in the general population, where concentration of disease is much lower than a hospital, masks magically work.

That's not how science actually works. I hope you understand that.

---

Pretty clear to me as a scientist. Where viral density is higher like hospitals, you need masks with greater efficacy (N95s).

I hope you understand how science works. That's not clear to me based on your comment earlier dismissing research because it had non-Americans involved

SamHou said:

---

AgResearch said:

---

So in a hospital setting, where disease potential is high, masks don't work. Now in the general population, where concentration of disease is much lower than a hospital, masks magically work.

That's not how science actually works. I hope you understand that.

---

Pretty clear to me as a scientist. Where viral density is higher like hospitals, you need masks with greater efficacy (N95s).

I hope you understand how science works. That's not clear to me based on your comment earlier dismissing research because it had non-Americans involved

---

Did you create your account just to jump on this board and troll real research scientists and educated individuals?

I started out believing in masks after I watched all of the videos last spring about droplets, 6 feet, and all of that.

After awhile I started to question if they actually work because you can't really point to the results of a community with strict mask standards versus those without. Most of the research articles are based on studies pre-covid or during covid but they were limited because they don't have an analysis of performance over the entire timeframe.

Here's what I've pieced together in my reading:

- The 6-ft distance rule is based on research done in the 1950s. The size of the particle that falls within 6-feet is quite large. There are most likely smaller particles that can carry the virus that stay in the air for hours. There are scientists that argue this. The problem is that they're engineers that primarily deal with pollution research. There are only a few scientists that have overlap between particle diffusion and medicine.

- The mask studies are limited in scope. This is probably because it's unethical to risk giving covid to someone, so they have to simulate with a lot of assumptions. For example they may only track large droplet reduction, limit the test to something like 30 minutes, etc.

- At this point there should be real world evidence that supports the idea that masks reduce transmission. The only thing I've seen is a CDC report that is kind of ambiguous and confusing.

If I try to argue with a pro-masker I am usually the one citing holes in research, data, etc. They usually say stuff like "masks work, they just do" or show me a meme that compares a mask to peeing with your pants on versus peeing naked. Stupid crap like that.

If anyone has an insightful research paper or scientific article on the subject, please post it. My fear is that we will never get a full in depth analysis of public policy on the pandemic because a lot of people don't want to discover that wearing masks for the past year may have been completely worthless.

SamHou said:

---

If you actually read the article, it address why there's mixed findings.

Surgical masks help prevent the spread in some situations but not others (eg, not in hospital settings)

---

If you actually read the article, you will find they collected no actual data and simply applied a mathematical model to reach a desired conclusion.

The only real world data used are airborne particle loads and respiratory particles produced by various activity (but only actually measured without masks). All these data was taken from literature. Everything the authors did was to apply a model to the data and reach a conclusion. Great, they got to a hypothesis, but have done nothing to actually test said hypothesis.

There is something to be said about experimentalists vs theorists.

Quote:

---

Without having any data at all to back up my suspicions, I've suspected that the cloth masks do not work worth anything. However, the medical masks probably work somewhat, and N95 masks work fairly well. The only argument that I've seen contradicting my suspicions is that Germany issued N95 masks to everyone yet had no better results than anyone else.

---

Good point. I had completely forgotten about that.

It's probably tough to determine the efficacy of masks because so much transmission is in living rooms.

Noble07 said:

---

Quote:

---

Without having any data at all to back up my suspicions, I've suspected that the cloth masks do not work worth anything. However, the medical masks probably work somewhat, and N95 masks work fairly well. The only argument that I've seen contradicting my suspicions is that Germany issued N95 masks to everyone yet had no better results than anyone else.

---

Good point. I had completely forgotten about that.

It's probably tough to determine the efficacy of masks because so much transmission is in living rooms.

---

Exactly, there is plenty of data to show most transmission was between members of the same household. That doesn't mean much for spread other than once someone in the household gets it, everyone else is generally out of luck. Not completely true, and we know there are people who successfully avoided infected the whole house by isolating in a room or area.

Keep it out of your house, and you would have been fine, but none of the mask mandates address that aspect (and who would follow those rules anyway).

The other side of this was mask rules were inconsistent in stupid ways. Feel free to take the mask off while eating/drinking, but wear it for the 2 minutes to get to your table.

The data on lack of efficacy of masks with respiratory spread viruses was there but it was not reported publically.

And nobody would listen if you stated it.

NASAg03 said:

---

SamHou said:

---

AgResearch said:

---

So in a hospital setting, where disease potential is high, masks don't work. Now in the general population, where concentration of disease is much lower than a hospital, masks magically work.

That's not how science actually works. I hope you understand that.

---

Pretty clear to me as a scientist. Where viral density is higher like hospitals, you need masks with greater efficacy (N95s).

I hope you understand how science works. That's not clear to me based on your comment earlier dismissing research because it had non-Americans involved

---

Did you create your account just to jump on this board and troll real research scientists and educated individuals?

---

Get over yourself.

And if I had posted that I would have gotten banned.

But whatever

It's been great wearing NO facial gear since March

SamHou said:

---

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/facemasks-block-expired-particles-despite-leakage

---

The pandemic is over. Take the shot, don't take the shot. I don't care. It's time to move on.

SamHou said:

---

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/facemasks-block-expired-particles-despite-leakage

---

This study is garbage, just like the previous studies that claim to show masks work. The actual results don't support the authors conclusions in the abstract. Here's what I gathered from reading the methodology and results, where all the statements in quotes are directly from the paper:

• "The APS characterizes particles from 0.3 to 20 microns in aerodynamic diameter, with a decreased detection efficiency for particles < 0.5 microns. As such, size distributions are only reported for particles > 0.5 microns". This is larger than covid-19, and on the threshold of respiratory droplets that carry covid-19.
• A vent-hood is used during measurements, which sucks up the smaller, lighter particles. "The clean airflow could affect the sampling by the APS by opposing or disrupting the expiratory airflows, more likely for talking as the air velocities are similar and with a potentially even larger influence with mask wearing when the flow is split in multiple directions."
• Particles released from all areas (top, sides, bottom) are not measured simultaneously. "In either case (flow disruption, or directional under sampling), the overall efficacy would be overestimated"
• "Looking to the top orientation, the median is only somewhat reduced compared to the no-mask condition, by 47%. While the difference in the absolute values between the no mask and top orientation is not statistically significant, if the are normalized by the no-mask values for each participant individually, the difference is statistically significant (p = 0.003)."

If you multiply all the efficiency values for all sides of the mask (forward = .93, top = .47, sides = .85, bottom = .91), you get a total efficiency of 29%, which is similar to what the EPA found in their tests of various masks.

This is for a new, properly fitted surgical mask. Now do the masks that the public is actually wearing: poorly fitted, used, dirty, well-worn, cotton masks.

SamHou said:

---

NASA - What is with you having conniptions about posting links to scientific studies? Do you only like it if something is posted that fits your beliefs?

DERM - I shared links to a couple articles. I thought this was a forum to discuss science / medical issues related to COVID.

---

Fair enough.

I read the articles and no one disagrees that masks may stop large particles if worn correctly.

To take that data and extrapolate to whether that decreases the spread of any virus is pure conjecture, would you agree?

The problem is that due to ethics(can not expose people to COVID from infected people)you can not do the controlled studies which prove or disprove how effective masks are.

So basically we get articles usually with a political bias which prove nothing.

The only way I can surmise the effectiveness of masks is looking at states who had strict mask refs and those that didn't.

Common sense says from looking at that data that masks were useless.