from Hacker News

Study: Association between mask mandates and Covid infections in North Dakota

by UkrainianJew on 7/10/22, 10:54 PM with 94 comments

  • by AnthonBerg on 7/10/22, 11:25 PM

    We also did not have data on the types of masks being worn or on masking adherence rates in the two school districts

    It is known that this is an aerosolized pandemic. Airborne. Cloth and surgical masks do not work.

    Source – there are many to choose from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362...

    The posted study on mandates has effectively no meaning. Closed FFP2/N95-style masks work. This is fact. A mandate does not make such masks magically appear on people’s faces. Therefore it is obvious that there is no effective correlation between the word “mandate” and what SARS-CoV-2 does.

  • by rayiner on 7/10/22, 11:49 PM

    > Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students.

    I’m glad that public health officials are actually doing this research and publishing these conclusions. Maybe I’ve gotten cynical, but I was worried that there would be limited retrospection about positions taken during the pandemic given the political sensitivities.

  • by imnotreallynew on 7/10/22, 11:36 PM

    There’s been quite a few of these studies, all with similar results. What’s unfortunate is that the remarkable “penetration” of the idea that cloth and standard surgical masks provided “adequate” (by any measure) protection was so great and peddled by such influential persons that there are now those who, despite plain empirical evidence, still maintain masks provide some material amount of benefit.

    I wonder at what point such people will began to consider the evidence in earnest, regardless of the fact that most of these mandates have thankfully been repealed.

  • by jtorsella on 7/11/22, 12:45 AM

    I'm surprised nobody has raised concerns about the authors. This group is notorious for producing near-fraudulent preprints in support of their preconceptions and widely publicizing them. Tracy Hoeg was responsible for an atrocious VAERS-based study making false claims about vaccine safety, and Neeraj Sood was intimately involved in the Hoover Institution's successful efforts in March/April 2020 to persuade certain media figures that Covid was less deadly than the flu. You can read more about that VAERS preprint here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/peer-review-of-a-vaers-dump... and some related recent work around child vaccines here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/an-impossible-trial/. I believe the third author is a professional covid skeptic associated with the organization "rational ground". This is not a reliable set of sources. I will have time to dig in later, but if this is anything like the rest of their work it's worthless garbage.

  • by philliphaydon on 7/10/22, 11:55 PM

    Doesn’t seem like a very ground study. But living in Asia has taught me masks do work, and they work at school. My 3yo doesn’t get a cold when the 1 kid in the class is sneezing and coughing. The 1 case of covid didn’t spread in the school to Teachers or students.

    But I get there’s a bunch of adults who can’t wear masks as well as a 3yo so in that case the adults are more likely to catch or spread covid with their inability to wear masks right.

  • by edmcnulty101 on 7/10/22, 11:22 PM

    It's not necessarily because masks don't work, medical professionals use them to great success.

    Mask usage at the community level does not follow the same strict policies related to mask usage that medical professionals do, like discarding them between operations.

    Wearing the same mask over and over every day and removing it when you sit down to eat is a very ineffective policy.

    And it's kind of an abuse of power for the government to mandate something with such weak science.

  • by xracy on 7/10/22, 11:28 PM

    This is a preprint study, also worth noting that the collection data for how they determined if the masks were being worn, was self-reported by the parents and school administrators.

  • by gibbitz on 7/11/22, 12:56 AM

    It seems that we're missing that this trend is likely due to the students contracting the disease outside of school. Most accidents happen within 30 miles of home doesn't mean you can take your seatbelts off when you are 31 miles away. This whole study exists to allow people to say masks don't help when they don't want to wear one. I get that there was a unique opportunity to compare and contrast here but what was being measured was only partly affected by the mandate. Regardless of the quality of the science here, the results are surprising, but I wonder what the comparison with a blue state district where the same mandates were in place would be...

  • by chmorgan on 7/11/22, 1:36 AM

    Another in a line of studies that have for a few years now been supporting this conclusion.

    The sad part is the hundreds of thousands of tons of waste produced due to ineffective mask materials, design, and usage.

  • by ClumsyPilot on 7/11/22, 12:34 AM

  • by xlaacid on 7/11/22, 11:46 AM

    The amount of variables not accounted for in this "natural experiment" is unfathomable. How did this get through a peer review....... oh wait, it didnt.

    Also, look under the authors, it lists "truth in data LLc" a right wing conspiracy nuthouse.

  • by chiefalchemist on 7/11/22, 1:02 AM

    > Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students.

    As expected.

    Simply put, as the science now states, the majority of masks weren't worth wearing. If it's not a KN95 or better, it's all but pointless. That is, you're effectively wearing no mask at all.

    We know this. Yet occasionally mask mandates kick in again, and the updated science (i.e., KN95 or better) is completely ignored.

    The disconnect - and those virtue signaling with subpar masks - is disturbing.