This sounds like you basically don’t believe in Evidence-Based Medicine and form your believe based on simple pathopathological models (the thing that Evidence-Based Medicine was about to fight) or don’t care about mask wearing to form an informed opinion about it.
To recap, there are actual studies on mask wearing. One of them is SARS-CoV-2 Transmission among Marine Recruits during Quarantine. The benefit of studying military recruits is that it’s likely the best group for complience to policies as the training instructors made sure that they were wearing their masks.
I now this might sound harsh but “I think you are wrong because of “one sentence pathopathological models’” is not the kind of argument I like to see on LessWrong from people who haven’t done any research to be familiar with the topic.
It’s not that I believe that you should always reason in an Evidence-Based manner, but be at least a bit more sophisticated about it.
It’s not that I “don’t believe in Evidence-Based Medicine”, it’s that you didn’t mention in your first comment that your were talking about a different study, so I really didn’t know what you were talking about. Thanks for giving the link.
The Marine study doesn’t address the effects of masks. Both the participants and nonparticipants wore masks. The actual difference between those groups was that the participants were asked about symptoms, tested, and isolated if positive at day 0, 7, and 14, versus only on day 14 for nonparticipants. It gives us some (unsurprising) evidence that surveillance testing and isolation helps: on day 14, at least 11/1760 (0.6%) and possibly as many as 22/1847 (1.2%) participants were positive, compared to 26/1554 (1.7%) nonparticipants. Unfortunately the reporting is not great, so we don’t know exactly how many participants were positive on day 14. And this is pretty weak evidence: we don’t know how many of the nonparticipants would have tested positive at day 0, so it’s hard to say how much of the day-14 difference was due to weeding out infected participants versus the participants possibly starting with a lower infection rate.
This sounds like you basically don’t believe in Evidence-Based Medicine and form your believe based on simple pathopathological models (the thing that Evidence-Based Medicine was about to fight) or don’t care about mask wearing to form an informed opinion about it.
To recap, there are actual studies on mask wearing. One of them is SARS-CoV-2 Transmission among Marine Recruits during Quarantine. The benefit of studying military recruits is that it’s likely the best group for complience to policies as the training instructors made sure that they were wearing their masks.
I now this might sound harsh but “I think you are wrong because of “one sentence pathopathological models’” is not the kind of argument I like to see on LessWrong from people who haven’t done any research to be familiar with the topic.
It’s not that I believe that you should always reason in an Evidence-Based manner, but be at least a bit more sophisticated about it.
It’s not that I “don’t believe in Evidence-Based Medicine”, it’s that you didn’t mention in your first comment that your were talking about a different study, so I really didn’t know what you were talking about. Thanks for giving the link.
The Marine study doesn’t address the effects of masks. Both the participants and nonparticipants wore masks. The actual difference between those groups was that the participants were asked about symptoms, tested, and isolated if positive at day 0, 7, and 14, versus only on day 14 for nonparticipants. It gives us some (unsurprising) evidence that surveillance testing and isolation helps: on day 14, at least 11/1760 (0.6%) and possibly as many as 22/1847 (1.2%) participants were positive, compared to 26/1554 (1.7%) nonparticipants. Unfortunately the reporting is not great, so we don’t know exactly how many participants were positive on day 14. And this is pretty weak evidence: we don’t know how many of the nonparticipants would have tested positive at day 0, so it’s hard to say how much of the day-14 difference was due to weeding out infected participants versus the participants possibly starting with a lower infection rate.
Correction: for participants on day 14, it was somewhere between 11 and 33 out of 1847 (0.6%-1.8%). Not that it makes much of a difference.