Anonymous wrote:Wow. Way to focus on on paragraph and not the conclusion of the study, which is specifically referring to the flu.
I focused on the paragraph that evaluated the effectiveness of masks in preventing transmission. It noted that, in all the medical literature there have been ten randomly controlled trials and not one of them showed any benefit from wearing masks.
This is not the flu we are discussing here! Transmission with this is different.
That is true. However the viruses are similar in size, present in the same parts of the respitaory system and therefore are very likely to spread similarly. You are correct that it remains a possibility, although a remote one, that there is a significant enough difference that covid spread can be reduced by masks in a way that 'flu is not. However - per my comment - there is as yet zero evidence for that.
From your article you posted: "It is essential etc. .....
These are statements about possiblities, not evidence. The links you provide again contain all sorts of statements, but lack any evidence. One of your links does eventually provide a study which shows that cloth masks lead to greater rates of transmission than medical masks but concludes "Owing to a very high level of mask use in the control arm, we were unable to determine whether the differences between the medical and cloth mask arms were due to a protective effect of medical masks or a detrimental effect of cloth masks."
The fact remains that the only actual experiments which have been run (ten of them) have failed to show any effect from wearing masks.
Also your statement "zero evidence masks work" is the dumbest and most tone deaf comment ever.
No it's not. It's accurate. There is zero evidence that masks work. That does not mean that it is impossible that masks help. It just means that there is no scientific evidence currently available to us that they do. However the fact that ten separate studies have failed to find any positive effect implies that it is quite likely (although I agree not certain) that they don't provide much of an effect if they provide any at all.