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Author Topic: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.  (Read 341592 times)

Ghostmaker

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3750 on: January 19, 2022, 12:01:59 PM »
Ah, but it's so much more profitable -- in terms of money and control -- to drum up panic and encourage people to not only wear masks but to actively threaten people asking questions about such mandates.

dkabq

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3751 on: January 19, 2022, 03:55:46 PM »
Where I would give you the nod is situations where you are in sustained, close proximity to others -- like a heath care worker. Which is why my wife wears an N-95 and a face shield (got to protect those eyes from spit or snot, if you are serious) when she is at work at the hospital.
Clinical environments are very different from random people on the street. Even if we ignore things like proper N95 fit and seal, medical professionals at work will be much more careful about donning and doffing their masks, making sure they remain in place, not touching them, cycling them out, and so on. Among the public, people often carry the same mask in a pocket for weeks, touch it all the time, and wear it on their chin.

All the pre-covid studies on the effect of masks on the transmission of respiratory diseases focused on clinical environments. There were no studies of the general public wearing masks. And even those studies were highly ambiguous, showing no or a very minor effect just barely crossing the threshold of significance.

Indeed. That is why pre-covid the CDC did not recommend the general public wear face masks. Then somehow, between February/March 2020 (St. Fauci's private correspondence in February and his 60-Minutes interview) and ~April 2020 there was enough SCIENCE!(tm) for that CDC guidance to be changed. Throw in the ever-moving goal-posts of %-vaccinated to reach herd immunity, vax or mask, and St. Fauci saying at one point in 2021 that you should wear two masks, and I am doubtful of anything proffered as the official narrative.

Pat
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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3752 on: January 19, 2022, 04:03:48 PM »
Where I would give you the nod is situations where you are in sustained, close proximity to others -- like a heath care worker. Which is why my wife wears an N-95 and a face shield (got to protect those eyes from spit or snot, if you are serious) when she is at work at the hospital.
Clinical environments are very different from random people on the street. Even if we ignore things like proper N95 fit and seal, medical professionals at work will be much more careful about donning and doffing their masks, making sure they remain in place, not touching them, cycling them out, and so on. Among the public, people often carry the same mask in a pocket for weeks, touch it all the time, and wear it on their chin.

All the pre-covid studies on the effect of masks on the transmission of respiratory diseases focused on clinical environments. There were no studies of the general public wearing masks. And even those studies were highly ambiguous, showing no or a very minor effect just barely crossing the threshold of significance.

Indeed. That is why pre-covid the CDC did not recommend the general public wear face masks. Then somehow, between February/March 2020 (St. Fauci's private correspondence in February and his 60-Minutes interview) and ~April 2020 there was enough SCIENCE!(tm) for that CDC guidance to be changed. Throw in the ever-moving goal-posts of %-vaccinated to reach herd immunity, vax or mask, and St. Fauci saying at one point in 2021 that you should wear two masks, and I am doubtful of anything proffered as the official narrative.
Lockdowns were also very strongly recommended against before covid-19. They basically took all the pandemic planning they'd done prior to 2020, threw it out, and made up new stuff.

TNMalt

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3753 on: January 19, 2022, 04:16:02 PM »
The follow-up to lockdowns in 2020 was severely lacking. Besides, if you didn't test then you'd have no covid cases to report.

Mistwell

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3754 on: January 19, 2022, 04:22:58 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

Mistwell

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3755 on: January 19, 2022, 04:27:11 PM »
Where I would give you the nod is situations where you are in sustained, close proximity to others -- like a heath care worker. Which is why my wife wears an N-95 and a face shield (got to protect those eyes from spit or snot, if you are serious) when she is at work at the hospital.
Clinical environments are very different from random people on the street. Even if we ignore things like proper N95 fit and seal, medical professionals at work will be much more careful about donning and doffing their masks, making sure they remain in place, not touching them, cycling them out, and so on. Among the public, people often carry the same mask in a pocket for weeks, touch it all the time, and wear it on their chin.

All the pre-covid studies on the effect of masks on the transmission of respiratory diseases focused on clinical environments. There were no studies of the general public wearing masks. And even those studies were highly ambiguous, showing no or a very minor effect just barely crossing the threshold of significance.

Indeed. That is why pre-covid the CDC did not recommend the general public wear face masks. Then somehow, between February/March 2020 (St. Fauci's private correspondence in February and his 60-Minutes interview) and ~April 2020 there was enough SCIENCE!(tm) for that CDC guidance to be changed. Throw in the ever-moving goal-posts of %-vaccinated to reach herd immunity, vax or mask, and St. Fauci saying at one point in 2021 that you should wear two masks, and I am doubtful of anything proffered as the official narrative.

Can confirm initial CDC advice was just that (though it was after the initial spread of Covid in the U.S., through all of March I think). I experienced a hilarious turn of events (or at least I found it funny) where a well know specialist doctor had published an article stating that masks would help and the CDC was making a mistake, and then anyone who posted that article on Facebook or Twitter got the post deleted and a suspension for posting fake news. Then a week and a half later the CDC revised their recommendation to match exactly what that doctor had recommended. And then mere weeks later if you posted the prior CDC policy which recommended against mask use, THAT became a deleted post with a suspension! It was a deeply moronic turn of events for social media - which is perhaps a redundant statement.

dkabq

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3756 on: January 19, 2022, 04:30:03 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

FWIW, I put little faith in either. There are just too many confounding effects that cannot be accounted for. I much prefer looking at mechanistic effects (e.g., fluid mechanics, aerosol physics, etc.).

Pat
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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3757 on: January 19, 2022, 04:59:39 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.
Nonsense, I nitpick them all. I've regularly stated in this thread that almost all the mask studies are very poor. Non-randomized, very small sample size, and otherwise very low on the tiers of evidence based medicine. And even with that, there's no strong signal in any of them. Most of the studies show no significant effect, while others just barely edge into significance. More importantly, most of the studies don't even measure what they need to measure if they're to have any relevance to public policy. 100% of the studies before covid, and most since, looked at N95 (mostly) or surgical masks (occasionally) in clinical environments. There were exactly zero studies that looked at cloth masks, and exactly zero studies that looked at mask use among the wider population.

The two studies that fall higher on the tiers of evidence based medicine are the Danmask and Bangladesh studies. The Danmask study shows no effect, and it seems to have held up pretty well. I haven't seen any substantive criticism. The Bangladesh study showed an effect, but had numerous methodological problems that we noted in the thread, and since that discussion medical statisticians have been given access to the raw data and came up with some more problems. Which is really disappointing, because it's the largest study by a big margin.

So at best, masks could have a small effect. Or no effect at all. There's no evidence whatsoever they have a strong effect.

I thought masks were a reasonable precaution at the start of the pandemic, because there was a lot of misinformation about the deadliness of the disease, and we really had very little idea how the virus was spreading. But as evidence came out supporting the highly aerosolized nature of the disease, the case for masks was demolished. The studies since have supported that conclusion.

Masks have known negative effects. They can spread disease, some people have difficulty breathing, and most importantly they hurt socialization for children. Since those are real and damaging downsides, and the potential upside is at best dubious, there's absolutely no justification for this obsession with masks, and the lack of attention to things like ventilation that have a much greater effect.

HappyDaze

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3758 on: January 19, 2022, 05:43:36 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

FWIW, I put little faith in either. There are just too many confounding effects that cannot be accounted for. I much prefer looking at mechanistic effects (e.g., fluid mechanics, aerosol physics, etc.).
Focusing on mechanistic effects isn't going to be entirely useful when human behavior is a major factor.

dkabq

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3759 on: January 19, 2022, 05:47:57 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

FWIW, I put little faith in either. There are just too many confounding effects that cannot be accounted for. I much prefer looking at mechanistic effects (e.g., fluid mechanics, aerosol physics, etc.).
Focusing on mechanistic effects isn't going to be entirely useful when human behavior is a major factor.

It provides an upper-bound on potential effectiveness.

dkabq

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3760 on: January 19, 2022, 06:03:38 PM »
Something to remember about statistical studies is that the null hypothesis (there is no statistically significant effect) requires a strong signal to reject. Moreover, the notional p <= 0.05 only says that it is a 1/20 chance you should not reject the null hypothesis. One can argue for lower p-value thresholds (I believe that the particle physics community uses p <= 1.0E-06).

Also, even if you find a correlation, you have to demonstrate to what extent the variance explained by the correlation explains the overall variance. I recently took a class on how to use the statistics package in MATLAB. One of the example problems had us looking for correlations in real-world NIH data. The instructor led us down the primrose path to finding a correlation with a very low p-value. Then he had us look at the variance explained by the correlation vs the overall variance; the correlation explained < 0.1% of the overall variance.

Pat
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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3761 on: January 19, 2022, 06:03:57 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

FWIW, I put little faith in either. There are just too many confounding effects that cannot be accounted for. I much prefer looking at mechanistic effects (e.g., fluid mechanics, aerosol physics, etc.).
Focusing on mechanistic effects isn't going to be entirely useful when human behavior is a major factor.

It provides an upper-bound on potential effectiveness.
Agree with HappyDaze on this. Human behavior is just too complex. You can do all the white room theorizing you want, but it doesn't mean anything unless you can test it in the real world.

dkabq

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3762 on: January 19, 2022, 08:20:31 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

FWIW, I put little faith in either. There are just too many confounding effects that cannot be accounted for. I much prefer looking at mechanistic effects (e.g., fluid mechanics, aerosol physics, etc.).
Focusing on mechanistic effects isn't going to be entirely useful when human behavior is a major factor.

It provides an upper-bound on potential effectiveness.
Agree with HappyDaze on this. Human behavior is just too complex. You can do all the white room theorizing you want, but it doesn't mean anything unless you can test it in the real world.

Understanding mechanistic behavior does not tell the entire story, but it is a key part of the story. Statistical studies are all well and good, but correlations that explain the majority of the variance just tell you where to look to understand the underlying causation.

Also, having a mechanistic upper bound can tell you, as a first cut, if something is important. For example, if blocking snot is important and a cloth mask is 99% effective (mechanistic upper bound) in that regard, that allows you to evaluated if that theoretical efficiency is sufficient for your intended purpose (might be great for covid, but maybe no so great for ebola). Conversely, if stopping very small aerosol particles was important and a cloth mask is 1% effective (mechanistic upper bound) in that regard, and you know that a higher effectiveness is necessary to impact the risk of spread, you could eliminate cloth masks from consideration.



Eirikrautha

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3763 on: January 20, 2022, 05:20:44 PM »
If masks help, why do RCTs not (on balance) show they help? Surely if they helped, then the evidence would consistently show this, rather than null/negative effect?

For every legit study showing they don't help there are more legit studies showing they do help. Whenever someone posts one of those studies showing they do help here, people nitpick it in a way they don't nitpick the studies showing it doesn't help. So the answer to your question is confirmation bias.

This is so false as to almost be a direct lie.  There are 26 RCT studies of mask usage cited in various CDC publications (almost none of which deal with SARS-Covid-19 directly, as to be expected considering the timeline that such trials have).  Over 75% show weak or no correlation.  The Bangladesh study and the Danish studies, even if taken at face value, provide little support for either conclusion.  Most medical studies are done at p<0.05, which means that there is only a 1-in-20 chance of the correlation being mechanically wrong (the process or conclusions, however...).  Do enough studies, and your 1-in-20 chances will start popping up.  It's not that surprising, then, that one of the 26 studies cited (the Bangladesh study) goes against the data from the rest.  One, or even a handful, of studies does not prove ANYTHING.  You need consistent, reproducible, results to start drawing any conclusions... which we don't have.  So, until such time as the RCT studies on mask-wearing are clear, reproducible, and overwhelmingly in favor, no efficacy of masks has been proven at all...

Zelen

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Re: Covid, the "lockdowns" etc.
« Reply #3764 on: January 20, 2022, 09:13:17 PM »
Remember when medical professionals cared about the Hippocratic oath, "First, do no harm"? I guess these days the oath is, "I think this works even though there's no data to support it, just do what I say or the policeman will break your jaw for your own safety."