Hi Cibola
I hasten to say that I am not a right wing Qanon conspiracy nutter and the virus is real and people are dying everywhere. I am a huge supporter of social distancing, shutdowns of services sector (if the government supports the workers with income as in Australia- only 3.8% reduction of GDP).
I have seen all the studies on mist sprays in a laboratory situation and yes I can see a reduction of potential spread but in a real community situation there are no studies I have seen that have shown more than a 10% reduction most are around zero percent improvement. Unfortunately when people put on the mask they do not change them frequently enough, touch them all the time, do not keep atight seal, and they tend to ignore social distancing as the mask is supposed to save them.
I actually started looking at the effectiveness of masks to verify that they work as we in Victoria were universally adopting them as an alternative to the stage 4 lockdown- in the stupid words of our state premier Dan Andres - masks are our stage 4. Well after around 12 days they did zero and we went into a successful lockdown- yet we kept the useless masks to this day. That alerted me that I needed to check the actual COMMUNITY BASED RESULTS.
I am an extremely pedantic person and real good with maths!
See below
A while ago I wrote a rant regarding the wearing of masks and stating that the effect was marginal at best and not as Captain Dan and others have described as being as useful as a vaccine. I pointed to a meta study of 21 other studies showing close to zero effect in community usage.
Well as you will all know I am a very pedantic and obsessive person when it comes to fact checking and I hate the unquestioning moron accepting journalists and health officials that just parrot and do not check their facts.
I WAS WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Masks are LESS THAN USELESS!!!
See attached data excel: If you feel frisky - do some numbers yourself!! They were extracted from the Victorian government,s own site
COVID-19 in Victoria: Coronavirus hotspots, postcode lockdowns
So if as you conspiracy nuts would say, they have hidden this lie of masks in plain sight. OK it proves the lockout works. Funny how they choose not to "adjust" the mask numbers- perhaps they reasoned that the average doctor and Journalist re too stupid and lazy to actually look at the results. They are correct
I extracted the file of cases infection vs date and plotted the graph, I then applied a 4 day average (the best approximation overall with minimal time shift- the use of a polynomial just was crap) on one version and on the other one I added my own best approximation curve to the 4 day average curve. Here are the results:
Raw result with 4 day average (dotted): Cases by day of second wave
View attachment 61135
I then plotted the stage 3 gradient, the past mask gradient between (day 5 to day 11), given most cases show up after 5 days and 98% after 11 days. I then plotted the gradient 5 to 11 days after the lockdown was introduced (after the failure of masks)
Note masks introduced on 23 July and the lockdown started on 2 August
View attachment 61136
In summary of above
Stage 3 (before masks) the increase in corona cases was 15 more cases than the previous day
Masks introduced - the daily increase on previous day was 25 more cases the previous day
Stage 4 lockdown introduced daily reduction of cases of -17 per day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now adding my "eyeball" extrapolation of the 4 day average:
View attachment 61137
In summary of above
Stage 3 (before masks) the increase in corona cases was 15 more cases than the previous day
Masks introduced - the daily increase on the previous day was 17 more cases the previous day
Stage 4 lockdown introduced daily reduction of cases of -19 per day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My main conclusion the effect of masks is negligible and within the "data noise" and in all probability
INCREASED the rate of rise of cases per day ....as the Meta study showed
Face masks to prevent community transmission of viral respiratory infections: A rapid evidence review using Bayesian analysis - Article (Preprint v1) | Qeios.
So why is Dan maintaining the use of these filthy things? Probably because it looks "quasi medical" and they do not want to admit it failed- and more probably their health advisor "experts" are incompetent and are too stupid to do year 12 graphical analysis!
And even more ridiculous is walking around the street outside with the gag on when 2 studies have shown 1 case in 1250 is caught outside (by idiots having a cuddle)
Yet more evidence that masks just have no effect.
First here is 2 more studies .....one done in 2017 examining the effect of masks against the flu:
Effectiveness of personal protective measures in reducing pandemic influenza transmission: A systematic review and meta-analysis
NUP
OK, I admit it. A Denmark study this year showed a 1% improvement!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That new study saying masks might not be effective? It has a few caveats.
But I digress, have a look at the Spanish flu of 1918 and how it ACCELERATED after masks were adopted (just like Victoria).
Dan really needs to go, just incompetent.
Did Masks Work? — The 1918 Flu Pandemic and the Meaning of Layered Interventions
Posted on May 23, 2020 by
pburnett
A large number of recent news items have reflected on our current crisis by looking to the past for comfort, commiseration, and even some answers. My own
writing on this is no exception. However, we need to be very careful about how we use history to inform our current context.
“Were masks effective in the 1918 flu?”
I was recently asked this question for an
article that just appeared in the
Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a fascinating exploration of the politics of masks in California during the 1918 flu, and the fact that Mayor Davie of Oakland was jailed for not wearing a mask in Sacramento. However, my statement at the end of the article, applied historically, is not correct by itself. I’m quoted as saying the gauze masks of 1918, “may not have been much use to the user but did offer protection to those around them.” I had in mind the ultimate public health lessons learned from the 1918 flu way down the line, in a study concluded a little more than ten years ago.
But back in 1918, public health leaders who studied the problem thought that the mask laws and mask use by the public were minimally effective.
Kellogg, Wilfred H. Influenza, A Study of Measures Adopted for the Control of the Epidemic. California State Board of Health. (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1919) 22.
This is from a study published in 1919 by the California State Department of Health. The above graph showed very little difference in death rates between Stockton, which mandated the wearing of masks in public, and Boston, which did not. So, early on, authorities were skeptical of the effectiveness of masks, but they also felt that masks were not used properly.
Part of the disappointment was that medical authorities had advised using medical gauze, which had a tighter weave than what most people understood as “gauze.” Then as now, not everyone had access to the personal protective equipment solutions that were recommended. People were using cheese cloth for masks, with predictable outcomes. The problem was the user. A more pessimistic appraisal of masks came in a study published in 1921 by physician William T. Vaughan:
“One difficulty in the use of the face mask is the failure of cooperation on the part of the public. When, in pneumonia and influence wards, it has been nearly impossible to force the orderlies or even some of the physicians and nurses to wear their masks as prescribed, it is difficult to see how a general measure of this nature could be enforced in the community at large.”
William T. Vaughan,
Influenza: An Epidemiologic Study, (Baltimore, MD:
American Journal of Hygiene Monographic Series, No.1, 1921
) 241.
Mask skepticism was officially sanctioned by the Surgeon General of the US Navy in a 1919 report:
“No evidence was presented which would justify compelling persons at large to wear masks during an epidemic. The mask is designed only to afford protection against a direct spray from the mouth of the carrier of pathogenic microorganisms … Masks of improper design, made of wide-mesh gauze, which rest against the mouth and nose, become wet with saliva, soiled with the fingers, and are changed infrequently, may lead to infection rather than prevent it, especially when worn by persons who have not even a rudimentary knowledge of the modes of transmission of the causative agents of communicable diseases.”
“Epidemiological and Statistical Data, US Navy, 1918,” Reprinted from the Annual Report of the Surgeon General, US Navy, (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919) 434.
Although the Surgeon General of the US Navy acknowledged that wearing masks by hospital staff was good practice, “the morbidity rate, nevertheless, was very high among those attending the sick,” and may only have prevented infection from a direct, close hit from a cough or sneeze of a patient. The protocols followed in the contagious annex of the US Naval Hospital in Annapolis, MD, were sufficient to prevent cross-contamination of “cerebro-spinal fever” (aka meningitis), diphtheria, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, and German measles. Not so with influenza. In fact, the infection rate of staff was as high in the high-protocol wards as in the improvised hospitals. In one improvised hospital at the Navy Training Station in Great Lakes, IL., the infection rate was
higher among those corpsmen and volunteers who wore masks than those who did not!
But what did all of this mean? Again, a discussion of a specific piece of technology by itself is not enough. This was not simply a question of “mask or no mask,” but of design, construction, supply, and use. The wearer needed to
use a well-designed mask properly, and change masks frequently. Therefore, most of the expert complaints about masks around the Spanish Flu pandemic in the US seemed to be about the users and reliable access to steady supplies of properly constructed masks, not the concept of wearing a mask.
Indeed, that’s what the research team led by Howard Markel found when the Pentagon asked them to study the Spanish Flu pandemic. In 2007, they published their
report on non-pharmaceutical interventions during epidemics and found that there was a “layered” effect of protection by using multiple techniques together: school closure, bans on public gathering, isolation and quarantine of the infected, limited closure of businesses, transportation restrictions, public risk communications, hygiene education, and wearing of masks.
So the key historical question here is not whether or not masks were useless. The broader, more troubling historical pattern that Erika Mailman revealed in her article is clear: the problem of public trust in public health. Some Americans, then as now, do not like being told what to do.
This is a complete scandal