Our argument is not about individual level protections (like almost every study before) but community level reduction of transmissibility—a public good, not as much an individual one. That can only be studied properly with high compliance, but you can still assemble evidence.
-
-
To argue for universal masks, we had evidence of asymptomatic contagion; evidence of reducing egress ( like this: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2007800 …) and preponderance of evidence it won't create harm (I found no precedent or reasonable argument for harm) and then we model.
4 replies 2 retweets 4 likes -
Plus, we now have four very interesting cases. HK (masks doing heavy-lifting but some other interventions); Taiwan (case study in everything right); Japan (only masks right everything else wrong: slower spread); Singapore (everything but masks great; didn't work, they switched).
1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes -
zeynep tufekci Retweeted zeynep tufekci
Plus, we have cases like this and some new countries like Czech Republic that are seeing lower rates of deaths and cases after switching to all masks.https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1253348619538890753 …
zeynep tufekci added,
zeynep tufekciVerified account @zeynepHospitals are very high-risk environments. Sick people concentrate there and staff can't distance. After Brigham and Women's Hospital required everyone, including patients, to wear masks staff infections dropped from 12-14 new infections per day to only 6. https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/23/brigham-and-womens-masks-infections … pic.twitter.com/Rrlj4CZu2TShow this thread2 replies 1 retweet 3 likes -
So now case is this: Preponderance of evidence from before; solid theory of action; lots of partial evidence (will probably never have RCT, won't be ethical). Challenge: infection control requires thinking society-level variables, not just individual outcomes. So here we are!
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @zeynep
Certainly if you leave out previous work in a survey article the evidence of one point of view piles up.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @stevesi
We haven't left it out! We review relevant evidence to egress and community-protection, especially if it was a good study. Even there preponderance of evidence has benefits (despite really, look at the studies. No solid ones for this question).
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @zeynep
I suppose you can then ask a question for which there are "no solid studies" and review a select set of other studies (solid though they may be, they are not the question you asked) and find preponderance of evidence. I'm just a fan of science that's all.
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @stevesi
And the science is absolutely on the side of the paper and recommendations. One of our co-author from Oxford U wrote one of the key textbooks on evidence-based medicine. We're not ignoring any relevant finding. I just added some tweets with all sorts of interesting new stuff.
3 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @zeynep
All I said was you were part of a survey paper and a half dozen recent relevant papers escaped mention. To which you said you asked a different question for which there was no research yet reached a conclusion to which I suggested maybe there was more relevance than indicated.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
I think again, I didn't say there was no research, but not the kind of conclusive study we would need, but I think we will have some from this event (regression-discontinuity designs for mask adoption). We really did not ignore relevant papers. Not the ones you cite either!
-
-
What are the half dozen studies that escaped mention? Sorry if I missed this in the discussion. We crowd sourced finding every paper pertaining to the topic we could find and included every single one in the review. None were intentionally left out.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
If something relevant to the topic is missing, that's an oversight I'd like to fix.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.