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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 13 2020, @04:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the every-little-bit-helps dept.

Face masks don't even have to work especially well to be effective:

Advice on whether or not to use face masks to limit the spread of the pandemic has varied from country to country, even differing by location within countries. These policies have had to balance whether there were sufficient supplies for medical personnel to divert some to the general public. And the whole issue was decided without a clear idea of whether face masks were actually effective against SARS-CoV-2.

But there has been reason to think masks would at least be somewhat affective, based on studies of the spread of droplets of material we expel while coughing or sneezing. And a recent analysis suggested a large group of individual studies collectively pointed to their effectiveness. But that analysis left a large degree of uncertainty about how effective they'd be at the population level and how face mask use would interact with other policy decisions.

The situation left us needing population-level modeling, which a group of UK scientists has now provided. The group's model indicates that face masks don't have to be especially effective to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and can even bring benefits if they make people more vulnerable to infection. But to really control the pandemic, they will have to be combined with a lockdown if we want to see the total infected population shrink.

[...] Right now, we just don't know enough about SARS-CoV-2 and protective gear to evaluate which of these models best reflect reality. But the models do set some reasonable bounds about what we might aim for. For example, they indicate that masks don't need to be especially good if we get enough people wearing them and couple their use to other policy initiatives.

Journal Reference:
Stutt, R., Retkure, R., Bradley, M., Gilligan, C., and Colvin, J. A modelling framework to assess the likely effectiveness of facemasks in combination with lock-down in managing the COVID-19 pandemic, Proceedings of the Royal Society A (2020) (DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2020.0376)


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:12PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:12PM (#1007482)

    Masks, by them selves, are NOT EFFECTIVE.

    Masks, when combine with SIX FOOT separation don't need to be especially effective!!

    This is a DANGEROUS headline.

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by DrkShadow on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:19PM (3 children)

    by DrkShadow (1404) on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:19PM (#1007483)

    Consider this set of graphs posted to ArsTechncia:
    https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-11-at-3.04.49-PM.png [arstechnica.net]

    It shows that only _the_most_effective_ medical-grade masks, when being worn _constantly_, will limit a highly infectious situation to leading to infecting less than one other person. For _less_ infectious situations, then a 75% effective mask can limit things to less than one (0.6 additional?) person being infected. For comparison, cloth masks, per additional recent research, came out as being maybe 30% effective.

    Given the common masks in use, you can expect each infection to spread to 2-3 additional people. EACH infection.

    Research says: Masks by themselves are worthless.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @06:05PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @06:05PM (#1007499)

      Given the common masks in use, you can expect each infection to spread to 2-3 additional people. EACH infection.

      Research says: Masks by themselves are worthless.

      You do realize going from, say, "3-4" down to "2-3" gives us significantly more time before the exponential growth of a local outbreak outstrips available hospital resources? And we can use that time to identify the outbreak and apply more severe measures (e.g. state or county level lockdowns) as needed, while letting parts of the country that don't have outbreaks carry on with life?

      Hardly "worthless".

      • (Score: 1, Troll) by DrkShadow on Saturday June 13 2020, @07:39PM

        by DrkShadow (1404) on Saturday June 13 2020, @07:39PM (#1007524)

        What you're talking about is what the lockdown was for. Stay-at-home orders.

        We're past that. We're talking about conquering the disease, not keeping from overwhelming our medical system. Masks are not effective in controlling the disease without other measures. For those who are especially susceptible, masks are a false sense of security, and enforced mask-wearing will lead to unknown risk-taking.

        Mask wearing, in combination with maintaining distance, is helpful. Effective masks (which the vast majority that I have seen are not) in situations where you can not actually maintain proper distance, is helpful. The article shows that masks, even less-than-ideal masks, are more effective when combine with distancing practices.

        Quote the article,

        mask use alone isn't able to get there. If, as in the top row, people start wearing masks after the onset of symptoms, there are no scenarios in which face masks alone are able to stop the pandemic—even if they are 95-percent effective and everyone with symptoms wears them.

        That's hardly taken out of context. Not everyone is wearing masks now, and no one wears one always (at home, with family). Almost no one is wearing an N95 mask, and of those that are, I've seen three people in the last two weeks wearing such a mask effectively.

        Again: Masks, by themselves, will not lead to a decrease in infections. Distancing with masks will lead to a quicker resolution than distancing alone, and masks alone will _not_ lead to a decrease in infections. See seven of the eight graphs in the article, where the last graph is visibly not being obided by by people anywhere.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @07:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @07:02PM (#1007518)

      It don't show me shit because it is presented without any context. No figure captions, no nothing. Is this about different types of masks protecting the wearer, i.e., the ability of homemade masks to filter things like viruses, or is this about the masks preventing the spread of viruses from a person who is coughing/sneezing? That is a big big difference there. Nobody is claiming a bandanna is working like a Hepa filter, for instance.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:37PM (#1007490)

    The group's model indicates that face masks don't have to be especially effective to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and can even bring benefits if they make people more vulnerable to infection.

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday June 13 2020, @09:51PM

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday June 13 2020, @09:51PM (#1007561) Journal

    We should not let the truth interfere with our quinquennial plans huh?

    maybe the mask is as effective as coughing into own elbow and sneezing into a handkerchief, probably it's more effective.
    but a lot of other effective things are not being implemented because of ideology, incompetence, criminal conduct, sociopathy.
    #abbracciauncinese

    --
    Account abandoned.