While this is a very interesting study, it absolutely cannot show that masks are or are not effective at reducing covid transmission. There are so many confounding factors, the results are basically meaningless.<p>The most obvious confounding factor is of course that as covid rates rise, people are more likely to wear a mask. This by itself explains the positive correlation between mask compliance and covid rates.<p>The paper says that the positive correlation is surprising. It is not.
The fact that there is no CLEAR evidence that masks are effective at improving COVID outcomes tells you that if they do have an effect, the size must be small. If they worked well, anywhere near say preventing 50% of infections, then you would not need complicated statistical analysis to tease out marginal hazard ratios from massive data sets.
Germany is currently a good testing ground for mask effectiveness. At the beginning of this month, the mask mandate has been dropped in most states, with some exceptions like public transport and hospitals. However, Mecklenburg Vorpommern and Hamburg declared themselves hotspots and kept the full indoor mask mandate, even though their infection rate was about the same as other states'. In MV it had been overturned by a court last week, but in Hamburg the mask mandate is still in effect.
So far, infection rates in MV and Hamburg have been about the same as in the other states (actually a bit higher).
As a caveat, there are still a lot of people wearing masks voluntarily. My guess is about 50% in super markets still wear them, with regional differences.
Conclusions<p>> While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.
It's really hard to make conclusion based on mask usage not accounting for many other factors such as population density.<p>You have places like Finland with 5 mil people and minimum contact vs. Netherlands with 1/8 of the area and 4 times the population. Then you have France, Italy where all people kiss to greet each other and Germany where they barely shake hands etc.<p>So don't think this is very productive study and I'm generally not in favour of mask mandates (sentiment-wise for we have yet to see reliable data) especially for recent variants.
I see a lot of comments conflating the mask types, and exactly who is being protected.<p>Just to put us all on a common footing, here is a reminder of what the public messaging (at least, here in the UK) has been for two years:<p>Any mask is essential for us to <i>protect others</i>.<p>At no point has it been shown that a mask-like face covering of unspecified material provides any significant degree of protection to the <i>wearer</i> against airbourne viruses.<p>It's still fairly controversial to suggest that mass mask-wearing of cloth masks may not have done much public good anyway.<p>It's pretty clear that a mask that is actually rated to filter to a certain level will protect the <i>wearer</i>, but then those masks typically have a valve to relieve the extra load on the wearer's respiratory system. Obviously, these masks will also not "protect others', as they dump all of your exhaled air right back into the vicinity.
Two years later. Actual imerial data have shown zero impact on mask wearing and transmission rates among the public.<p>And still forums cling on to subpar research like this.<p>Masks among the public have done a fantatic job of filling the oceans with garbage. Nothing positive came out of the mask mandates.
Not a single positive aspect.<p>Mask, visors and goggles among healthcare personell are completely different. Takes a few minutes to suit up. And can be so painful that the people wearing them have bruises on their faces.<p>But they protect the wearer and zero slogans out there have yelled masks on all hospital workers to protect the patients.
Never was the case.<p>Jesus the obsession with forcing one another to cover our faces ( in US even small toddler for crying out loud ), is closer to saudi or taliban religious dogma than science.<p>Crazy world. Masks in restaurants. Cafees. Masked servent around maskless famous people. During strenous excercise. On small children where they are absolutely a choking hazard, so masks during playtime but masks off during collective naptime.
All the masks on the streets, in bushes and trees and flying about especially around bus stations and stores.
Disposable pink chinese surgical mask on a hipster wearing a save the wales tshirt where there are no madates is about as cringe as it gets.
Edit: in addition to the part below, I now see major flaws:
Of course there is a positive correlation between masks and deaths. But the causality is important: when I see more deaths in my country, of course will I wear my mask more often.
This study would have been much better if changepoints would have been looked at.
In this Form there are many unknown von founders to draw conclusions in my opinion.
For now I keep my doubts on this study.<p>Before edit:
Can someone shed light on the trustworthiness of that publication website as well as the author?
Is “cureus” a trusted resource? I’m always doubtful if there is only one author on a paper - unless it’s a really well known person.
COVID-19 was used by far too many as a vehicle to push their profile or agendas. This result seems to be quite in contrast to the investigations famous labs and institutions did (like RKI and the likes)
Hold up. Who the heck thought it was a good idea to put masking policy on the Y axis and deaths on the X axis. Also what the heck does Y% mask compliance mean? Does that mean Y% of people wore it 100% of the time and (1-Y%) wore it never? Or does it mean if you picked a random person at a random time, there was a Y% chance they were wearing a mask? There's a distinct lack of clarity in what exactly is being tested here.<p>I agree with the ranking the paper has gotten so far in the side bar. Its weak point is its study design and methods. Frankly, that part reads like someone who furiously googled some data to win an online argument, not like a scientific paper.
How to drown any effect in the random sea of confounding factors but still claim correlation an potential causality in the end.<p>> the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.<p>Or people in countries with higher mortality were slightly more likely to wear masks.
The one sentence summary: “These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.“<p>Should this source be trusted or not? If it’s trusted, does that mean that our efforts to mask were basically a waste of time, or not?
What this study shows is that when infection rates are high people wear masks, and conversely, that when people wear masks infection rates are high. Or put another way, it either shows that high infection rates cause people to wear masks, that wearing masks causes high infection rates, or that neither causes the other but some tertiary value not part of the study causes both to rise and fall in tandem.<p>It does not effectively demonstrate the amount that wearing a mask raises, or reduces, infection rates.
> These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage.<p>That could be because the majority of masks (e.g., the ultra-cheap blue ones) are - per the CDC - all but useless. That is, wear a mask (that's no mask at all) and you're all but unmasked.<p>Oddly enough, currently, (e.g.) Philadelphia reinstated an indoor mask mandate, but made no requirement for an <i>effective</i> mask (according to the data / science).<p>It makes no sense.
One argument I've seen against the use of bike helmets is that people naturally gravitate to a certain risk level. Thus helmet wearing, it is argued, leads directly to a slightly more risk-taking style of cycling which cancels out the safety benefit of the helmet.<p>Agree with that or not (I personally argue that my head is disproportionately in need of protection compared to other body parts - I had a crash that broke the helmet into three pieces and broke my collarbone - but no harm done to my head) - but the same could be said about masks. I've seen many ineffective masks - simple cloth, worn with big gaps around the nose, even ski masks at the ski hill that have a vent for the nose. But now that we're masked, we're doing our thing, we can relax, right? So the usual mob scene at Costco with not even token attempts to keep distance. Would absence of masks cause people to be more cautious?
One problem with the data is that they have distinct entries for United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, yet the latter is part of the former.<p>So does United Kingdom as used in the table actually mean Great Britain, or are the NI figures actually also included in the UK figures?<p>If they were/are distinct, non sub-setted, data sets, then they'd possibly make a useful comparison, but without that extra info it is impossible to interpret those numbers.
Just this comment again: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31158391" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31158391</a><p>:-(
I liked masks. Privacy, warmth during winter, anecdotally had no cold infection in the past 2 years (usually have one every year, and I wasn't stuck at home in the worst period of Covid), protects against each others' bad breath, everyone is quieter since it's harder to talk.<p>Everyone complaining about masks ignored all the other, more pressing problems around restrictions/Covid. It was kind of like complaining about losing a rare banknote by getting shot in a mugging.<p>Now we're "Covid free" and no one wears one, and it's really awkward to be the only one with a mask...