{"id":1915,"date":"2021-08-12T16:52:07","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=1915"},"modified":"2021-08-12T16:52:07","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:52:07","slug":"do-masks-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=1915","title":{"rendered":"Do Masks Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A review of the evidence<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Authors: Jeffrey H. Anderson<\/a>August 11, 2021\u00a0Covid-19Health CarePolitics and law<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seriously people\u2014STOP BUYING MASKS!\u201d So tweeted then\u2013surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, \u201cThey are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.\u201d Two days later, Adams said, \u201cFolks who don\u2019t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.\u201d Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: \u201cDuring normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.\u201d About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that \u201cthere is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.\u201d He added, \u201cIn fact there\u2019s some evidence to suggest the opposite\u201d because of the possibility of not \u201cwearing a mask properly or fitting it properly\u201d and of \u201ctaking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surgical masks were designed to keep medical personnel from inadvertently infecting patients\u2019 wounds, not to prevent the spread of viruses. Public-health officials\u2019 advice in the early days of Covid-19 was consistent with that understanding. Then, on April 3, 2020, Adams announced that the CDC was changing its guidance and that the general public should hereafter wear masks whenever sufficient social distancing could not be maintained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast-forward 15 months. Rand Paul has been suspended from YouTube for a week for saying, \u201cMost of the masks you get over the counter don\u2019t work.\u201d Many cities across the country, following new CDC guidance handed down amid a spike in cases nationally caused by the Delta variant, are once again mandating indoor mask-wearing for everyone, regardless of inoculation status. The CDC further recommends that all schoolchildren and teachers, even those who have had Covid-19 or have been vaccinated, should wear masks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018\u201319 flu season<\/a>\u2014a season of \u201cmoderate severity\u201d that lasted eight months\u2014than have died of Covid-19<\/a> across more than 18 months. What\u2019s more, the CDC says<\/a> that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces\u2014and so should their teachers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change\u2014and in a remarkably short period of time\u2014or just the guidance on wearing them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since we are constantly told that the CDC and other public-health entities are basing their recommendations on science, it\u2019s crucial to know what, specifically, has been found in various medical studies. Significant choices about how our republic should function cannot be made on the basis of science alone\u2014they require judgment and the weighing of countless considerations\u2014but they must be informed by knowledge of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In truth, the CDC\u2019s, U.K.\u2019s, and WHO\u2019s earlier guidance was much more consistent with the best medical research on masks\u2019 effectiveness in preventing the spread of viruses. That research suggests that Americans\u2019 many months of mask-wearing has likely provided little to no health benefit and might even have been counterproductive in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For More Information: https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of the evidence Authors: Jeffrey H. AndersonAugust 11, 2021\u00a0Covid-19Health CarePolitics and law Seriously people\u2014STOP BUYING MASKS!\u201d So tweeted then\u2013surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, \u201cThey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[162,375],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-face-masks","category-news-of-the-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}