New Year, New Mask Mandates, Old Science
The Data On Mask Mandates Remains The Same
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Once again we are seeing the professional medical community wander down the well-trodden road of science denialism over face mask mandates.
Local officials across the US are reinstating mask mandates in hospitals as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports an upward trend in Covid-19 hospitalisations.
Near the end of December, weekly hospital admission rates for Covid-19 hit their highest since January 2023, the CDC reported. Local officials in several states — including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, New Jersey and New York — have now reinstated mask mandates in healthcare settings.
The reason for this latest round of anti-science foolishness? Yet another scary SARS-CoV-2 variant has emerged and is making the rounds.
Now, JN.1 accounts for 39-50 per cent of circulating variants in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on 22 December, and the proportion of JN.1 is increasing more rapidly than other variants. Local officials in several states are also reinstating mask mandates in healthcare settings after the CDC reported an upward trend in hospitalisations for Covid-19 at the end of December.
If one were to take the corporate media at face value, one might easily conclude that yet another “wave” of pandemic disease is upon us. However, if one takes the time to scrutinize the data even a little bit, one quickly realizes that fears over JN.1 are greatly overstated, and thus the concerns powering the reflexive return to mask mandates are largely nonexistent.
It is ironically appropriate that a public health policy for which there is no good evidence is being deployed to combat an “outbreak” of disease for which there also is no good evidence.
We should acknowledge that, based on the CDC’s genomic surveillance data, the JN.1 variant is indeed the most prevalent SARS-CoV-2 variant circulating in the United States at the moment.
That one data point reported by corporate media is accurate.
However, the degree to which there is a “surge” of COVID cases in the country is considerably more problematic. COVID hospitalizations are increasing, but have been doing so at a steady rate for a number of weeks.
The rise in hospitalizations predates the advent of the JN.1 variant, and so it is physically impossible for this new variant to be the catalyst behind the rise in hospitalizations.
While hospitalizations are rising, COVID deaths are projected to enter a downward trend after holding steady for many weeks.
This echoes the reality that, for most of the United States, COVID hospitalizations are not a problem.
What should we make of the rise in COVID cases? Simply that it is cold and flu season. ‘Tis the season for COVID, Influenza, and RSV cases to rise, and that is exactly what they have been doing.
Note that Influenza cases are rising more rapidly than COVID-19 cases. If an infectious respiratory disease is currently cause for alarm, that disease is influenza, not COVID.
Based on how much more rapidly test positivity rates for influenza are rising relative to COVID, COVID is, if anything, close to or at a peak.
We should also note that RSV test positivity rose first, and peaked first—all without the corporate media raising a ruckus or hospitals reflexively resorting to amply discredited mask mandates.
We are in the middle of cold and flu season. It naturally follows that we are seeing cases of cold and flu (and COVID).
If cases of cold and flu and COVID are rising, why shouldn’t hospitals impose mask mandates, as indeed hospitals in New York and California are currently doing?
NEW YORK (WABC) -- A mask mandate has resumed for all 11 of the city's public hospitals after an increase in coronavirus, flu and respiratory syncytial virus cases.
The mask requirement also applies for all health clinics and nursing homes run by NYC Health + Hospitals.
Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said Wednesday the requirement is for areas of the hospital where patients are being treated.
In California, the mask mandates are being described as “common sense” precautions.
"Over the past week in Los Angeles County, there have been notable, yet not unexpected, increases in COVID-19 reported cases, hospitalizations and deaths," the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in a statement. "While recent increases are significant, they remain considerably below last winter's peak and common-sense protections are strongly recommended to help curb transmission and severe illness as the new year begins."
The threshold for the CDC's medium level is between 10 and 19.9 new COVID hospital admissions per 100,000 population over seven days. The CDC reported 10.5 new COVID hospital admissions per 100,000 people in Los Angeles County for the week ending Dec. 23.
"Based on the Los Angeles County Health Officer Order posted on December 27, 2023, when the COVID-19 hospital admission level in Los Angeles County meets or exceeds the CDC's Medium Level, all healthcare personnel, regardless of COVID-19 and influenza vaccination status, in licensed health care facilities that provide inpatient care are required to mask while in contact with patients or working in patient-care areas," the department's statement said.
Surely a mask mandate is common sense—after all, the media has said repeatedly how face masks are proven conclusively to work very well against the spread of COVID. Even Scientific American waded into the mask mandate fray in December 2022, with two “experts” making that very claim.
But there is a straightforward way to cut down on the risk for ourselves and others. When it comes to individual decisions, masks are among the most low-cost and most effective steps that can be taken to broadly reduce transmission of a multitude of viruses.
As I discussed when that article first appeared, however, the problem with that assertion is that it is factually unsupported, logically fallacious, and simply wrong. Mask mandates are not common sense because they are not grounded on solid evidence.
The data on face masks has not changed since then. Even though mask mandates emerge in the news with some regularity, the fundamental scientific evidence regarding them remains the same, and remains an argument against their implementation.
Nor is this junk science fixation limited to Italy. Corporate media here in the United States continues to push the much disproven claim that face masks make a difference in COVID-19 spread, or of the spread of any infectious respiratory pathogen.
Even after the expiration of the US public health emergency declaration and with many Americans moving away from pandemic precautions, masks continue to offer some protection, reducing your risk of catching Covid-19 in a community setting like in a close doctor and patient interaction, according to the study, which reviewed the latest science on the protective quality of masks.
Because corporate media continues to push this arrant nonsense (and theories which have been repeatedly disproven can only be considered arrant nonsense and never anything else), we must yet again beat the dead horse of the number of studies that have shown literally for nearly two decades that universal masking does not affect the spread of infectious respiratory disease.
The answer to the question why should hospitals not reimpose mask mandates is the same as it has always been: there has never been any evidence showing they are impactful against the spread of infectious respiratory disease.
There was no good evidence supporting them when they first became prevalent in 2020.
In fact, mask mandates have been so lacking in supportive evidence that the “experts” have repeatedly contorted themselves to discredit the volume of evidence discrediting the mandates, even attempting to discredit the very concept of the Randomized Controlled Trial as the “gold standard” of clinical evidence.
Where this latest defense of the science denialism over face masks truly goes off the rails, however, is in Ms. MacIntyre’s assertion that Randomized Controlled Trials are not “necessarily” the best way to evaluate pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions against disease.
The Cochrane Review combined randomized controlled trials (RCTs) using meta-analysis. RCTs test an intervention in one group and compare it with a "control" group that doesn't receive the intervention or receives a different intervention. A meta-analysis pools the results of multiple studies.
This approach assumes (a) RCTs are the "best" evidence and (b) combining results from multiple RCTs will give you an average "effect size."
But RCTs are only the undisputed gold standard for certain kinds of questions. For other questions, a mix of study designs is better. And RCTs should be combined in a meta-analysis only if they are all addressing the same research question in the same way.
Yes, you read that right. RCTs are not really the “gold standard” in clinical research after all. Never mind that there are multiple papers within the clinical literature explicitly stating that RCTs indeed are said “gold standard”123.
The mask mandate is the fake science that simply will not go away. It is a bogus public health mitigation that rests entirely on a foundation of junk science and garbage scientific claims. The data has always shown that to be true.
Nor has new data emerged that actually supports mask mandates. Quite the contrary, the latest research still argues against mask mandates. A December, 2023 systematic review1 of extant case studies found that mask mandates were in particular of little or no benefit to children.
Conclusions: Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence. The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.
Research2 also points to a couple of salient reasons why broad-based mask mandates are unlikely to be an effective public health mitigation against infectious respiratory disease: there is simply too much variance in mask materials and their mechanistic ability to filter out contaminants and pathogens.
Aerosol filtration mechanisms are divided into gravity sedimentation, inertial collision, interception, diffusion, and electrostatic interaction. The results for multiple mechanisms and a mechanism’s type of interaction are related to the aerosol particle size, airflow density, and material structure. However, in actual filtration mechanism processes, inertial collision, interception, and diffusion are important mechanisms for removing fiber aerosols, which is complex. Improving the efficiency of a filter is dependent on increasing the number of mask layers, reducing the fiber’s diameter, and reducing and changing the fiber’s structural density.
The influence of the aerosol size and type on filtration performance is not constant. Filtration efficiencies may increase with an increase in aerosol particles or decrease with a decrease in aerosol particles. However, generally speaking, for the same type of mask, the protection performance should improve with an increase in aerosol particles. The type of aerosol used is specific for a specific environment, and the aerosol used in a laboratory is engineered to not be harmful to people. The effect of gas flow rates on filtration efficiencies is very clear. The filtration efficiency decreases with an increase in the gas flow rate. The higher the filtration efficiency, the greater the pressure difference and increase in respiratory resistance. In addition, matching is a common problem observed in masks, and masks have improved matching performance with higher filtration efficiencies.
There is also an inverse relation between the filtration efficiency of various mask materials and the level of breathing comfort associated with their use.
The respiratory resistance of a cloth mask, surgical mask, N95 mask, P100 FFR mask, and PARR mask increased in the listed order and as the filtration efficiency increased. In general, an increase in filtration efficiency will also lead to reduced comfort. However, if the thermal comfort performance of masks is improved, the cost and price of masks will increase. Therefore, on the basis of balancing the protective function and economy, it is recommended that the public should wear surgical masks to prevent COVID-19 infection in low-risk and non-densely populated areas.
Note also that there is a cost correlation at play as well. The better the filtration efficiency of a mask, the more costly that mask is going to be. Thus at all levels of filtration efficiency, the economics of mass masking alone work against any such policy.
The simple engineering reality of face masks is that how the individual face mask functions, and how well it does or does not filter out contaminants and pathogens, ultimately does not extrapolate to how well mass adoption of face masks will or will not work as a public health mitigation against infectious respiratory disease. All of the arguments in favor of face mask use to prevent COVID rely on these mechanistic qualities of the individual mask. This is simply not a logical or valid mode of argument, because the required extrapolation is not logically supportable.
We may be in a New Year, and there may be new SARS-CoV-2 variants out in the wild, but the old research data regarding the inefficacy of mass masking as a public health mitigation remains every bit as valid today as it did one year ago, and as it did in 2020.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is at this juncture part of the endemic Influenza Like Illness landscape. Sadly, equally endemic is the corporate media propaganda regarding the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and no corporate media propaganda is more ludicrous, more false, more deceitful, than their constant propaganda that face mask mandates are at all effective against COVID.
Face mask mandates are junk science. Reject them as such.
Sandlund, Johanna et al. “Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review.” Archives of disease in childhood, archdischild-2023-326215. 6 Dec. 2023, doi:10.1136/archdischild-2023-326215
Wang, Ao-Bing et al. “A Review of Filtration Performance of Protective Masks.” International journal of environmental research and public health vol. 20,3 2346. 28 Jan. 2023, doi:10.3390/ijerph20032346
If the medical industry admits they were wrong about masking, their entire set of mandated protocols starts to unravel. Plus, they will lose even more of the trust of the public.
Still, Truth will prevail - eventually.
Remember ‘glasnost and perestroika’ in the old USSR? Once the Authorities started down the path of being actually truthful and transparent, the whole rotting, stinking corruption of the Soviet Union came out, and this let to the implosion of the Communist Party’s reign.
I’m looking forward to watching a similar implosion in our monopoly corporate medical industry. Thanks to writers such as yourself, documenting the facts and science, I have hopes of seeing that day!
You might add Same Old "BS" to your title after Old Science!! Linking as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/