This by JV Last in his newsletter contains important news that shows just what morons the right wing anti-maskers really are:
The COVID deniers simultaneously insisted that:It was proven that masks didn’t retard the spread of COVID.All of those studies showing the effectiveness of masks weren’t conclusive enough. They didn’t really prove anything with perfect epistemic certitude.
And that was all on top of the “I won’t wear your slave mask” / “let’s trigger the libs” performative mask refusals.The “there’s no settled science” on masks stuff was always bs. There were enough studies showing that masks provided at least some protection that anyone claiming otherwise was cherry picking in order to reach a preferred conclusion.
But now even that fig leaf has been removed.
Pardon me for saying so, but: No shit? The sky is blue.2+2=4. And wearing masks slows the spread of the respiratory virus COVID-19.If you want some of the details, here they are:
The researchers enrolled nearly 350,000 people from 600 villages in rural Bangladesh. Those living in villages randomly assigned to a series of interventions promoting the use of surgical masks were about 11% less likely than those living in control villages to develop COVID-19, which is caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, during the eight-week study period.
The protective effect increased to nearly 35% for people over 60 years old.
Providing free masks, informing people about the importance of covering both the mouth and nose, reminding people in-person when they were unmasked in public, and role-modeling by community leaders tripled regular mask usage compared with control villages that received no interventions, the researchers found. . .
“Our study is the first randomized controlled trial exploring whether facial masking prevents COVID-19 transmission at the community level,” Styczynski said. “It’s notable that even though fewer than 50% of the people in the intervention villages wore masks in public places, we still saw a significant risk reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 in these communities, particularly in elderly, more vulnerable people.” . . .
There were significantly fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with surgical masks compared with the control villages. (Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.) This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks.
However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.Wearing masks protects people from COVID. Even if not everyone is doing it.
As of today, the official count is that 642,451 Americans have died from COVID. The real total—which we probably won’t piece together for another year or two—will be much higher.
And to every asshat who refused to wear a mask, who bullied people trying to do the right thing, who contorted the data and evidence with bad-faith mock seriousness, who posed and preened about how they weren’t going to wear a damn mask . . .
(That guy is currently the GOP frontrunner for the Ohio Senate seat.)
To all of those people: You did this.
A mea culpa from the anti-maskers wouldn’t make up for the death they helped spread. But it’d be nice all the same. At least it would be a signal that they acknowledge that they’ve been wrong and had remorse.I’m not holding my breath.