Hogwash against masks to stop covid-19

A recent Letter to the editor at The Recorder about wearing masks, shows a classic example of conservative use of social media to mis-support an issue. A few minutes of looking dis-proved the statement that masks do not limit the spread of covid-19. The articles referenced in the recent letter are suspicious on first look. One by Cato Institute who tend to spin any issue to the far right, in fact, the study goes into great detail which basically shows that masks do work, just not 100%, often due to mis-use. The second was not a medical study but a opinion study of the statistics used in a granted limited case study, which is fine however does not show anything about the general case.

More important, the whole letter uses the not-100% as the basis for supporting not doing it. This is the same argument often used against vaccines – since they don’t totally block the virus, so don’t use them. An argument that totally ignores that public health is, by its nature, a complex arena that takes a long view of many actions to address each issue.

A few minutes of research leads to these references:

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