Well yeah, that's the thing. Even if there's a 0.000001% chance that a mask will actually do something, it's still the safer option. It's not going to hurt me to wear a mask for a few hours.
If only Ireland would stop letting ****ing tourists coming in. Thanks UK/USA.
Which makes the mask flip flopping all the more puzzling.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
Now you know how the "racists" on the right feel about our broken open door immigration policies.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
Well, there are the stories about mafioso grinding people up and putting them in salami.
So if you've ever had pepperoni pizza, you just might transform into The Wendigo.
__________________ What CDTM believes;
Never let anyone else define you. Don't be a jerk just to be a jerk, but if you are expressing your true inner feelings and beliefs, or at least trying to express that inner child, and everyone gets pissed off about it, never NEVER apologize for it. Let them think what they want, let them define you in their narrow little minds while they suppress every last piece of them just to keep a friend that never liked them for themselves in the first place.
Eating dead human bodies is a specific form of cannibalism called "necro-cannibalism." Killing someone and then eating them is "homicidal cannibalism."
And eating part of someone who you fully intend to live (willingly or not) is a fetish or mania and it has a name. I forget. Vorarephilia (vore)? Cannibalistic Sadism? I can't remember. It has a name.
This source contains each individual state and some are increasing, some are decreasing. In aggregate, this seemingly manifests as growth in positives cases per test.
If you take a peek at the second link right above, it seems there are quite a few more than just four states who've seen positive cases per test go up. Where I'd agree? Increases/decreases lies at the feet of state and federal authorities but it seemingly also has quite a good deal to do with the generalized culture and social proclivities of each state's population.
Moving on, what I am about to address I did address partially earlier, and specifically highlighted how a collection of epidemiological studies supported the usage of mask due to rates of infectivity pre-and-post masking wearing (then stated the WHO and the CDC supported it and asked if you thought they were bullshitting), but would like to add further comment specifically concerning RCTs.
Now, there are some RCTs but they're not quite the perfect sort of RCT that we would really desire (I'm not sure if such an RCT would pass an IRB). I go off of the summary of proof within this particular piece: https://web.archive.org/web/2020061...wanted-to-know/
It seemingly indicates that there is higher quality evidence in favor of mask-wearing than against. For example, it's likely good to don masks within indoor locations that are crowded where you'll be there for an extended period of time. That being said, no one reasonable thinks masks are a cure all. However, they're useful in mitigating within high-risk circumstances/situations.
Concerning HCQ/CQ, I don't think we have an RCT for those either, no? With respect to COVID-19, specifically.
There's nothing we can discuss that has not already been discussed, in my opinion, because the data speaks for itself. Any thing we'd state would just be restating what is in the data and the graphs already exist for that - so we could just use those. We state anything contradictory to the data, we'd just be wrong. This is why I say let the data speak for itself.
Biggest thing that sticks out to me is there are now 11 states with increased deaths, 2 of which have not seen spikes greater than prior numbers.
If you take a look at the screenshots in time, when they were taken, it was just 4 states who saw deaths increase which is the reference to 4 states. I did not misrepresent the data.
In this next section, I've addressed all of this already. Including the content that you linked from the Web Archive (why did that site take down that article?).
I've even gone through 2 different meta-analyses which covered almost only quality RCTs (and they have a few study overlaps).
Because some quality research found that even the N95s did not offer additional protection.
And all of this specifically applies to HCWs.
What happened with the RCTs on households, they found no benefit because people simply interact with each other too much and the virus gets everywhere:
And to your last point, yes, we don't have any quality RCTs for COVID-19 for the general public because there's no way to control who wears and who does not wear a mask - the best you can do is a retrospective study and it cannot be an RCT or even highly quality due to the self-reporting nature.
You could potentially do an RCT based on people who guarantee they will not wear masks and still follow up with with verifications of masks (like in the Thai study) and only use lab-positive results (because multiple studies found that mask wearing creates a placebo effect and measuring that against lab results showed no benefit).
__________________
Last edited by dadudemon on Jul 16th, 2020 at 07:19 PM
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
This appears to be a different argument than what I initially responded to, which was:
It appears that positive cases are increasing per test. I'd agree that the fourteen day growth in deaths reported is localized to certain states, that's borne out in all of the data I've observed where several, particularly within the South, are now peaking when it comes to caseload.
So, it's really not the point of the masks to wear them in your household. They're more relevant for when you go outside, on public transportation, to your job, etc.
I would agree that if you live with somebody and that person gets it, you'll all get it pretty hastily in most given situations. I don't think the advice has been to wear masks around your family. This is when pooled testing is most useful.
Well, I was asking about RCTs concerning HCQ and CQ, not concerning masks in this instance. I'd agree it will be arduous to assess the effects of mask usage in retrospect, but I cannot wait to check out what type of clever proxies people use to achieve higher faithfulness than self-reporting, or if there are solid arguments in favor of self-reporting. With that being said, there are good arguments to believe mask-wearing is prudent in the contexts detailed by the SSC article.
Addendum: Concerning the web archive you inquired about, what happened was the NYT was going to write a story about that particular blog. Initially? Things seemed fine, but then the NYT said they were going to report the author's full name. That particular author works as a psychiatrist and doesn't want that level of publicity attached to his blog since he feels it could affect his job ngeatively. The NYT said that it was unfortunately policy, and so in response to that, he proceeded to delete his blog. It is likely temporary, but we'll see.