Masks are not meaningless; they're just not effective against COVID. The (quite important) meaning recently carried by masks is purely tribal. Failing to wear a mask marks someone as unwilling or unable to meet the dictates of the God of Mass Media.
We need some way to distinguish people like that in our society; there's no telling what they might do. They might not even be carrying their smartphones with them!
Your statement is tribal and devoid of any facts. It is not mass media, it’s the medical community that has stated and proved the effectiveness of masks. They are not a cure or fool proof but they are quite effective at slowing or stopping transmission depending on the mask type.
The article is a pretty decent counter argument about mask mandates, which is why my statemnet was tribal, and whi can't help but see yours as the same.
I am SO curious how history will judge this entire farce. This will go down as the experiment of what happens when we actually listen to the crazy hollywood scientist that keeps preaching the end of the world and the outcome speaks for itself.
Oddly enough my surgeon removed his mask once he left the operating room, how come? Does he want to harm his patients and staff, so he can perform more surgeries?
There is something deeply ironic about this author's righteous indignation over "intellectual dishonesty."
Looking at the first chart offered, comparing Kentucky and Tennessee, the chart interestingly begins in December of 2020. Both states have a drop in cases beginning around January 2021, and as the cases seem to bottom out, both roll back mask mandates—albeit with Tennessee doing so first. Here's what's wildly dishonest about this:
1. Extend that chart back a year, and you'll see that Tennessee—whose governor was opposed to any statewide mandate—spent most of July/August with a 7 day average hovering around 2,000 new cases. Kentucky, where the "cowardly" governor did mandate masks, was hovering around 600. Tennessee's population is 50% larger, and yet, they were experiencing more than 3x the case count.
2. In January, when all of these graphs seem to drop, the vaccine was rolling out. These charts, if anything, do a better job of demonstrating the efficacy of vaccinations than they do of showing the ineffectiveness of masks.
At the very best this is really really bad science. At worse, this is misinformation with a veneer of science.
It's just a bunch of graphs with: "look at that! see I told you!". No controlling of variables, no hypotheses, no actual data or meta study of existing data, nothing about actually how masks work. This author is just cherry picking country/state level levels of Covid and making wide assumptions based on laggy and noisy data. This is for Facebook clicks to try and make people that don't like masks happier.
It's a peice of cloth over your face, is it really that bloody hard? If the mask stops only 10% of transmission, isn't that still worth it?
There's absolutely no way masks are meaningless. There was essentially no influenza season last year, in norther hemisphere or southern hemisphere countries like South Africa, that masked.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] threadWe need some way to distinguish people like that in our society; there's no telling what they might do. They might not even be carrying their smartphones with them!
Yes.
> proved the effectiveness of masks
The article is a pretty decent counter argument about mask mandates, which is why my statemnet was tribal, and whi can't help but see yours as the same.
Looking at the first chart offered, comparing Kentucky and Tennessee, the chart interestingly begins in December of 2020. Both states have a drop in cases beginning around January 2021, and as the cases seem to bottom out, both roll back mask mandates—albeit with Tennessee doing so first. Here's what's wildly dishonest about this:
1. Extend that chart back a year, and you'll see that Tennessee—whose governor was opposed to any statewide mandate—spent most of July/August with a 7 day average hovering around 2,000 new cases. Kentucky, where the "cowardly" governor did mandate masks, was hovering around 600. Tennessee's population is 50% larger, and yet, they were experiencing more than 3x the case count.
2. In January, when all of these graphs seem to drop, the vaccine was rolling out. These charts, if anything, do a better job of demonstrating the efficacy of vaccinations than they do of showing the ineffectiveness of masks.
It's just a bunch of graphs with: "look at that! see I told you!". No controlling of variables, no hypotheses, no actual data or meta study of existing data, nothing about actually how masks work. This author is just cherry picking country/state level levels of Covid and making wide assumptions based on laggy and noisy data. This is for Facebook clicks to try and make people that don't like masks happier.
It's a peice of cloth over your face, is it really that bloody hard? If the mask stops only 10% of transmission, isn't that still worth it?
This is just more posturing.