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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why are people in this thread saying masks don’t work when the studies show otherwise?  University of Michigan examined masking in schools and found spread was 62% higher in schools without masks.

https://www.abc12.com/coronavirus/university-of-michigan-study-shows-mask-mandates-at-schools-show-lower-covid-transmission-rates/article_9dfcd525-94d5-50cb-9b00-ac1c2171d7fe.html[/quote]

Where’s the study? Is it peer reviewed? It is science? After the CDC itself had to walk back it’s own cherry-picked “studies” when it was called out for lack of scientific standards, I don’t trust a local news story in Michigan about supposed study.[/quote]

And here’s another study from North Carolina in the journal Pediatrics showing effectiveness of universal mask wearing in schools.

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/149/1/e2021054396/183460/School-Safety-Masking-and-the-Delta-Variant

Where’s the study showing they aren’t effective?  The Atlantic article doesn’t count.[/quote]

If you read the study you would see that it measured a 2-month period in the summer (bad given the seasonality of the virus), took place when masking was universal (bad - no control group for comparison), and instead compared in-school transmission to community-wide rates of infection. Making the comparison is fine if your goal is to show that schools are generally safe places that experience much lower rates of transmission than the communities they are in. But the last paragraph, without evidence, attributes the difference in infection rates almost entirely to masking. Not to demographic differences, not to ventilation (NC summers mean A/C is on all the time), not to factors intrinsic to school environments as opposed to where the majority of transmission occur. Just masks.

The problem with asking for research showing masks don't work is that studies have a null hypothesis. This means that they start with the hypothesis that two factors are not related, and the studies seeks to disprove it by showing a statistical correlation. A study with a reportable finding is said to have "disproven the null hypothesis".

If, in truth, there is no relationship between the two factors being measured, then most studies will show little connection and thus get reported as "inconclusive", or as having "failed to disprove the null hypothesis". Typically academics cover themselves by saying that more research is needed, or they might adjust their parameters until they do come up with a statistical finding (this is called p-hacking). If study after study (good studies, mind you, not dumb ones looking at 2 months of cases for a seasonal virus) shows only a weak or absent connection, then rational scientists will recommend against a thing because it hasn't been shown to work.

In the case of masks in school, we're in this odd situation where even the studies that purport to show a benefit either 1) aren't looking at school environments but communities as a whole, or 2) show only a very weak effect that could easily be random chance (or raises the possibility of p-hacking), or 3) suffer from poor study design that fails to identify causation. But because the situation is so politicized and organizations like the CDC have invested so much credibility in this issue, that very weak evidence is treated like really good evidence and the onus is placed on the critics to somehow prove a negative. That's not how study design and statistics are supposed to work. 
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