Good thread on the Cochrane Review on masks and Covid.

🙄

Link to tweet

?t=wQGYDMa2CKHQEPTl6pqyTQ&s=19

And I keep getting Leo Spaceman stuck in my head.



It feels more and more that "trust the science" is coming with an asterisk.

Trust the Science!*

*as long as it reinforces a narrative.

Like, I've seen people get mad if empirical evidence doesn't show worst case scenarios for things. As if anxiety and panic are moral goods that require validation.

I haven't read the study just yet (however, I have seen a few articles about it). I'll make plans to today. I do know, as someone currently in school to go into medicine, I've had more than one medical professional take a look at my double layered cloth mask and say, "You know that does nothing, right?"

Intellectually, I know this. Emotionally, I find the mask comforting. As long as I know this is more of a self-soothing thing at this point, who cares. It's when science gets bent and contorted to justify the emotional components that we run into problems.

We can't run science as just another political narrative where things are or aren't true based on whatever narrative need is required in the moment. This development in our culture bothers me a great deal.

Which I really don't think it does. I think it's more dismissive of the masks studies during covid because they aren't RCTs.
They do work in labs but during omicron states where there was high mask compliance (the northeast) did no better than anywhere else. There should be reasons why.

Otherwise what are people like doctors and bothering about?

But how the populace has been managing things. I don't think a lot of it was effective. It kind of devolved into a sort of security performance we see with the TSA while traveling. "This does nothing, but as long as people think it's helping."

I remember I was on campus about a year and a half ago. My first in-person classes commenced with mask requirements. And there were people wearing loose handkerchiefs over their faces while wedging 30 people into a small classroom.

It was like, "What are we doing here, man? Who is this for?" It was totally performative.

Now, stick everyone with medical grade masks with proper care and practices, it's a different story. But people just aren't going to do that. There's no way. We never did that, even at the height of the pandemic.

And I think the demands for performance are counterproductive. People know it's not really doing anything. They resent the demand and the people insisting on it. "What about the immunocompromised?!" is emotional blackmail in service to ineffective practices. It doesn't make people more thoughtful. It pisses them off because they know it's dishonest. And the ones largely doing the demanding don't care about the science. It's the emotional component that's working on everything.

There is a regimen of masks and practices that would be effective. But we've never come even slightly close to practicing them. We just pretended to in order to make everyone feel better. JMO on all of it.

(And I have my mask in my pocket as I'm about to walk out the door to campus).

Where a lot of Covid spreads.

If you can breath with it on, a virus can certainly get in. Masks will only prevent the wearer from spitting on everything around them and protect everyone around the wearer from being spit on. It's a precaution, not a preventative. If you can inhale and exhale with said mask on, certainly a virus can go in and out. And COVID is airborne, as are MANY other viruses . So there's that.

And people are more interested in headlines than nuance. This study reviewed other studies and basically said there wasn't a high enough degree of confidence in those study's results to support masks offering protection. Basically, there is too much uncertainty to draw conclusions either way and therefore, "The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks."

And it's 1 review, there are many others that did find evidence mask wearing helps.

We don't make decisions based on 1 study or even a review like this of multiple studies. It's a data point that helps paint a picture. And even if the next 10 reviews all show the same thing and mask wearing is more definitively shown not to help stop Covid transmission, it doesn't mean that we were wrong to wear masks or require mask wearing, we were acting with the best information at the time.

I do think that DU has had its share of science deniers around Covid in both directions. But the last year it has trended towards alarm and anger when our leaders follow the science with easing Covid policies. Get vaccinated, no one is stopping you from wearing a mask and self isolating, but the risk from Covid is quite low right now, transmission is low and deaths are the lowest daily since the opening days of the pandemic. Long Covid is definitely something we should monitor.

If you're not familiar with the source, shouldn't that be a pretty good indicator that you're being fed lies and bullshit?

With a source and that could be for any number of reasons, including simple ignorance.

So I take online sources with about as much of a grain of salt as possible.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full

Yeah, I want to make twitter a very painful experience for Elon Musk.

particular thread I think is good because it refutes some RW talking points about the Cochrane study.

And I still use Twitter. It remains the best source of info on Ukraine.
Oh. It's time to read DefMon3.