Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

There are very few public health interventions that don't require accompanying education, including hand-washing to combat the coronavirus & condoms to prevent STDs. We don't typically warn people against those because they might implement them incorrectly.

Agreed 100. I think the government warnings are also dangerous, misleading, and confuse the whole debate. The CDC has been really messy in this.

There are 0 studies that I know of, of public use of cloth, there are filtration experiments, but only one RCT I know of from 2011 in hospitals. There is good anecdotal and historical data, but what “we know” isn’t as clear, I think.

I've looked into it. There's a very strong body of evidence supporting N95s (which many people in CA *already had* due to widespread wildfires) and surgical masks, and homemade masks are variable based in material and construction but appear not to be useless.

But I have never, ever seen empirical evidence suggesting that cloth masks *increase* the risk of contracting a viral illness, and to date it's one of the most egregious claims I've ever seen by someone touting any sort of relevant credentials.

The single RCT Vietnam did just that, though experimental conditions were complicated. The problem I see is a ton of misinformation about cloth filtration powers from a study with 21 subjects. And no one has tested if masks, absent public health ed make people take greater risks.

One problem I noticed when looking over literature on DIY masks a few weeks ago is that you'd see everything from "t-shirt over face" to a fitted 3-layer design with a filter substrate. As with condoms, "don't engage in risky behavior" is key. Blaming the condom is woo territory