An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19

[khalwat]

We just don't agree. I like it that you're willing and able to have a respectful dialogue with me. I appreciate that a lot. I don't believe putting masks on kids is the right thing to do. I don't believe keeping them out of school was anything other than criminal. I don't care who it is making the argument that we've done our best for the kids or what studies or data you can point to that supports that. I believe the kids have been failed in a big and sad way. I respect you and what you have to say. We just do not agree on this one subject and we likely won't ever.

My problem with your argument is the bolded word above: believe.

What you believe, or what I believe, is irrelevant. What matters is what works, and to the best of the current knowledge of experts around the world, masks are beneficial in helping to prevent the spread of COVID.

If the worldwide scientific consensus changed, my stance would change to match it.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

You're claiming that what the overwhelming majority of governments on this planet, and the overwhelming majority of experts in virology & immunology on the planet have concluded is wrong.

You are also implicitly claiming that all of the studies that conclude that masking helps control the spread of COVID-19 are wrong.

So present the proof that you have to back up these extraordinary claims.

I will say that I personally hate wearing masks, and would be thrilled if conclusive proof became available that showed it was a pointless endeavor.

Sadly, that seems unlikely.

[country978]

We just don't agree. I like it that you're willing and able to have a respectful dialogue with me. I appreciate that a lot. I don't believe putting masks on kids is the right thing to do. I don't believe keeping them out of school was anything other than criminal. I don't care who it is making the argument that we've done our best for the kids or what studies or data you can point to that supports that. I believe the kids have been failed in a big and sad way. I respect you and what you have to say. We just do not agree on this one subject and we likely won't ever.

My problem with your argument is the bolded word above: believe.

What you believe, or what I believe, is irrelevant. What matters is what works, and to the best of the current knowledge of experts around the world, masks are beneficial in helping to prevent the spread of COVID.

If the worldwide scientific consensus changed, my stance would change to match it.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

You're claiming that what the overwhelming majority of governments on this planet, and the overwhelming majority of experts in virology & immunology on the planet have concluded is wrong.

You are also implicitly claiming that all of the studies that conclude that masking helps control the spread of COVID-19 are wrong.

So present the proof that you have to back up these extraordinary claims.

I will say that I personally hate wearing masks, and would be thrilled if conclusive proof became available that showed it was a pointless endeavor.

Sadly, that seems overwhelmingly unlikely.

I didn't say that there was no benefit. I believe, yes believe, that masking children causes more harm than it does good. Just like you I'm a parent and want what is best for all the kids, not just mine. You're only pointing to studies that support your position. Ok, fine. There are also studies that have been conducted which detail the downside risks to kids being masked and so I think the right approach is to balance risk/reward. Kids in schools are going to be exposed to one another, mask or not. They are still kids after all. I'm not as articulate as Druff so, instead of engaging me in this debate why not respond to Druff's segment about this from the last show? I thought he did as good a job as anyone could to make the case against masking kids.

[khalwat]

1) Different COVID reporting techniques. Many third-world coutries do not keep good records of such deaths, nor do they put much effort into determining which deaths are associated with COVID. Additionally, many other countries don't report a COVID death as "someone who died who also tested positive for COVID", which we do. This leads to the US over-counting COVID deaths.

I'll ignore that there's no citation here at all, and just assume what you're saying is correct.

Let's just remove all of the countries on the list that could be considered "third world" countries or countries with poor reporting capabilities.

We are still doing awful compared to the rest of the world.

Let's take a country that's roughly similar in terms of culture, which is Canada. We have 3x as many COVID infections per capita vs. Canada (cite: https://covidly.com/) and even more inexcusably, we have 3x as many deaths per capita vs Canada (cite: https://www.statista.com/statistics/...n-inhabitants/)

Now I will grant you that's merely one cohort, but looking at the data, we are not handling this crisis well at all.

Countries that are doing extremely well are largely in Asia; Korea, Japan, and a number of other Asian countries are relatively unaffected because their citizens actually listen to and follow the advice of their government on public health matters.

Japan has had 145 deaths per million from COVID.
Korea has had 83 deaths per million from COVID.
The USA has had 2,418 deaths per million from COVID.

So we're not talking about anything even remotely close, we're talking orders of magnitude here.

The USA has had 16x more deaths per capita from COVID than Japan, and 29x more deaths per capita from COVID than Korea.

You can't tell me something isn't shamefully wrong here. (cite: https://www.statista.com/statistics/...n-inhabitants/)

2) Highly social population with a longtime emphasis on individual rights, and a general distrust for authority. This is why lockdowns and mask mandates don't work here. Even those on the left who outwardly support them are often found to be violating them behind closed doors (including the governor of California!) In general, people in the US are simply unwilling on the whole to act in hive mind, or to blindly do what they're told. This, in turn, leads to difficulty in preventing the spread of viruses.

This is true that the USA has a strong distrust of the government, which at times can be a strength. However, it is not a strength during a public health crisis.

3) High level of politicization of COVID. There has been so much misinformation on both sides, that nobody knows what to trust or believe. This is why it's so hard to convince many on the right to take vaccines -- because the left has repeatedly lied or misled people about COVID. The vaccine DOES help slow the spread, but the left lost credibility after a year of contradictions, lies, and attempt to suppress dissenting opinoins, so now we have the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect.

Most of the politicization I see is being done by people. It's pretty sad to see people so aligned either with a political party, or against a political party, that they will throw all reason out of the window.

The very idea that someone would be distrusting public health information based on the political affiliation of the person providing it (and not their expertise or credentials in the field) reveals a very broken system.

In any case, while vaccine hesitancy has caused some additional COVID spread (and death) in the US, the lack of such hesitancy wouldn't have stopped COVID. Even very highly vaccinated countries are noticing that they simply cannot stop COVID, and that the previous herd immunity model is not happening as expected.

Stopped, no. Slowed and mitigated it, absolutely it would have.

The masking needs to be abandned entirely. The burden-to-benefit ratio is simply not there. The benefit is negligible, if it exists at all. The burden, which manifests itself in many ways (including distrust of other much better preventative measures, such as vaccines) is simply too high for something with negligible benefit.

Except that there's no basis in fact for these statements. Let's say there's a worst-case effectiveness of masks, and it's just 1% effective.

That's still 1 person in 100 that will not contract the disease. That's one less hospital bed that needs to be taken up, and one less person that we'll have to pay for (treatment always costs far more than prevention).

And the way the R factor 2.79 for "regular" COVID and 5.08 for delta (cite: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34369565/) that 1 person makes a logarithmic difference in how many people the disease ends up spreading to.

So the idea that masking "don't do anything" is disputed widely by experts and studies alike, and even if masks "don't do much" they still have a significant compound impact, to the best of our current knowledge.

We should be going back to normal life, and focusing upon the big things which really can help. There shouldn't be a battle over something which may or may not prevent a tiny percentage of the infections.

I would love to go back to a normal life, but to say that the overwhelming recommendations from experts around the world in terms of how to mitigate the disease are wrong is an extraordinary claim indeed.

[khalwat]

I didn't say that there was no benefit. I believe, yes believe, that masking children causes more harm than it does good. Just like you I'm a parent and want what is best for all the kids, not just mine. You're only pointing to studies that support your position. Ok, fine. There are also studies that have been conducted which detail the downside risks to kids being masked and so I think the right approach is to balance risk/reward. Kids in schools are going to be exposed to one another, mask or not. They are still kids after all. I'm not as articulate as Druff so, instead of engaging me in this debate why not respond to Druff's segment about this from the last show? I thought he did as good a job as anyone could to make the case against masking kids.

Fair enough. I actually have children who are of school age (elementary and middle school). I'm not sure where you do or not, but that's largely irrelevant.

I can tell you that our kids don't particularly care about masks. They are minorly annoying, and they'd rather not have to wear them, but they are so used to it that it's just not a big deal.

They are not being "hurt" in any way by having a piece of cloth on their face in schools.

[dwai]

I didn't say that there was no benefit. I believe, yes believe, that masking children causes more harm than it does good. Just like you I'm a parent and want what is best for all the kids, not just mine. You're only pointing to studies that support your position. Ok, fine. There are also studies that have been conducted which detail the downside risks to kids being masked and so I think the right approach is to balance risk/reward. Kids in schools are going to be exposed to one another, mask or not. They are still kids after all. I'm not as articulate as Druff so, instead of engaging me in this debate why not respond to Druff's segment about this from the last show? I thought he did as good a job as anyone could to make the case against masking kids.

Fair enough. I actually have children who are of school age (elementary and middle school). I'm not sure where you do or not, but that's largely irrelevant.

I can tell you that our kids don't particularly care about masks. They are minorly annoying, and they'd rather not have to wear them, but they are so used to it that it's just not a big deal.

They are not being "hurt" in any way by having a piece of cloth on their face in schools.

that's the problem you fucking idiot

[sonatine]

whats the line on when khalwat realizes hes talking to people who are, medically speaking, learning disabled?

[country978]

whats the line on when khalwat realizes hes talking to people who are, medically speaking, learning disabled?

Its only now you joined to conversation so who knows? I'm sure most people are well aware of your deficiencies by now though.

[dwai]

whats the line on when khalwat realizes hes talking to people who are, medically speaking, learning disabled?

Its only now you joined to conversation so who knows? I'm sure most people are well aware of your deficiencies by now though.

sonatine is literally a 50 year old fat virgin man who pretended to be in a poly relationship for clout on PFA and has sheltered himself inside his dad's property for 2 years, nobody gives a fuck what this dweeb thinks

[limitles]

Its only now you joined to conversation so who knows? I'm sure most people are well aware of your deficiencies by now though.

sonatine is literally a 50 year old fat virgin man who pretended to be in a poly relationship for clout on PFA and has sheltered himself inside his dad's property for 2 years, nobody gives a fuck what this dweeb thinks

shut up clown

[dwai]

sonatine is literally a 50 year old fat virgin man who pretended to be in a poly relationship for clout on PFA and has sheltered himself inside his dad's property for 2 years, nobody gives a fuck what this dweeb thinks

shut up clown

[limitles]

shut up clown

It's been a while but remind us what's it like in grade nine?

[country978]

Its only now you joined to conversation so who knows? I'm sure most people are well aware of your deficiencies by now though.

sonatine is literally a 50 year old fat virgin man who pretended to be in a poly relationship for clout on PFA and has sheltered himself inside his dad's property for 2 years, nobody gives a fuck what this dweeb thinks

thanks for clearing that up Dwai. Its a little confusing when a person never says a word to you and then spouts off nonsensical stupidity about nothing. This makes sense.

[limitles]

sonatine is literally a 50 year old fat virgin man who pretended to be in a poly relationship for clout on PFA and has sheltered himself inside his dad's property for 2 years, nobody gives a fuck what this dweeb thinks

thanks for clearing that up Dwai. Its a little confusing when a person never says a word to you and then spouts off nonsensical stupidity about nothing. This makes sense.

jesus h you're stupid

[khalwat]

So much for having a meaningful discussion.

[TheXFactor]

You might be able to get away with not wearing underwear but you are going to have to wear a mask for the next several years.

[sonatine]

So much for having a meaningful discussion.

sir for your own good, *look where you are*.

[country978]

So much for having a meaningful discussion.

sir for your own good, *look where you are*.

Is that the point Sonatine? You don't have anything of value to add to a discussion and so you just come in and make it about you, then act as if you're not the one making "where you are" the dumbest place on earth? I realize you used to be somebody here, even a respected and valued person, but since I started reading what you've got to say you've said not one memorable word or added anything of value to a single discussion that I can remember. That's all good with me. I wasn't around when you were a somebody so you're less than nothing to me. But, why turn yourself from something into what you've been recently? I treated you with all the deference and respect of the de facto PFA mayor you seem to have been at some point but now you're just another rude asshole with nothing to say. What gives?

[country978]

thanks for clearing that up Dwai. Its a little confusing when a person never says a word to you and then spouts off nonsensical stupidity about nothing. This makes sense.

jesus h you're stupid

It really is beneath me to keep responding to you this way, Les so this'll be the last time I allow you to engage me in negativity. I think you're mostly an ok guy Les and I've tried to encourage you in positive ways since I decided you were worth even a little of my time. But all this stupidity and negativity is not what I want to spend a second more of my life on with you. So either you find a way to treat me with with a basic level of respect and decency or there will be no more responses from me to you on any subject ever and you lose the last person here who thinks you're even worth responding to. I'm asking you as nicely as I can to please take it easy on me.

[PROUDBOY MAGA 2024]

sir for your own good, *look where you are*.

Is that the point Sonatine? You don't have anything of value to add to a discussion and so you just come in and make it about you, then act as if you're not the one making "where you are" the dumbest place on earth? I realize you used to be somebody here, even a respected and valued person, but since I started reading what you've got to say you've said not one memorable word or added anything of value to a single discussion that I can remember. That's all good with me. I wasn't around when you were a somebody so you're less than nothing to me. But, why turn yourself from something into what you've been recently? I treated you with all the deference and respect of the de facto PFA mayor you seem to have been at some point but now you're just another rude asshole with nothing to say. What gives?

You have Pre Boycott Fatboy and Post Boycott Fatboy. Pre boycott version, was on here 100+ hours/week being a pompous ahole dominating nearly every thread with his wise cracks and hollier than thou commie attitude. Post boycott version posting only about 1% of his prior total and is no longer an in house resident. Same smug know it all attitude.

[country978]

I have respect for Sanlmar and all he says. He's treated Tine as if he's somebody or at least at one time was and so too did I as a result. I suppose even the great and worthy Sanlmar can get it wrong once.