Hey, covid foot is a thing.
It’s not ethical to set up a prospective study on this when all the evidence points towards masks being helpful, and the risk of harm being so insignificant. (We have decades of experience of people wearing mask, everyone from woodworkers to surgeons to randos in most of Asia, with no evidence of harm.) So you aren’t going to find one of those.
I’ve posted several retrospective studies here, suggesting the efficacy of masks, most of which you’ve ignored. Hell, one of which YOU posted, albeit indirectly. I’ve also posted “proof of concept” studies, where various masking material is tested against various types of virus, including covid. Again, it looks like masks ought to reduce the amount of covid virions passing in and out.
While the evidence for masks isn’t completely overwhelming, it’s pretty damn good. Most healthy people should be wearing masks in public when local covid rates are high.
3 Likes
Yes. Have you been in a cave for the last few years?
2 Likes
I’m not saying that you must have particular credentials to do science. That is clearly wrong. Einstein did a lot of his best work before he got his phd, for example. And I haven’t looked at the degrees of any of the authors of the papers i’ve read.
But if you (meaning any person) are watching youtube videos, you are doing it wrong. You should be looking at papers that can be reviewed by other experts.
If you are looking at single papers without considering all the other ones, you are doing it wrong. One paper cannot be read in isolation.
If you consider changing opinion in response to be evidence of lying (a claim i have read repeatedly about fauci, but not made by you) they you are doing it wrong by mistaking humility for moral weakness.
All this is true whether you have a phd or never graduated high school.
2 Likes
I’m confused about the hypocrisy. Who is suggesting that mothers and fathers wear masks in their homes to feed and diaper their infants? I’ve never heard AAP advocate for that, so I don’t understand the hypocrisy.
1 Like
AAP suggests caretakers for young children (i.e. daycare workers) mask all day while caring for infants & young children. Their justification? (paraphrased) "There aren’t any studies showing that’s harmful 
"
Also, after being called out on their hypocrisy, they’ve since “memory-holed” any pages on their website on the importance of face time.
Do you have a cite where the AAP recommends that primary caretakers of infants wear masks around the infants? Because that’s pretty different from recommending masks for K-12 education.
1 Like
This page was last edited in April
But Dr Prasad in his video was responding to this recent tweet (part of a thread by AAP):
I wonder if they were thinking of places with lots of people and not a ton of hours, and were expecting those babies to get to interact with their parents’ faces.
I mean, kids are adaptable, and blind kids can grow up to be socially fine. And risking brain damage to your infant is scary. But personally, i would want my sighted infant to see the faces of the adults they are interacting with. And most place that care for infants have a very small number of kids-to-adults. I’d want them “bubbling” so the same few babies and adults are together every day, to reduce the number of contacts. Which, anecdotally, is what my friends with children under 2 all did.
1 Like
“May also consider”
…
“…in addition to…”
Do you have evidence of this?
See my link above
I love statements like this coming from actuaries. It’s one of the reason I stick around.
1 Like
I’ve skimmed through the AAP pages on recommendations for masking. Nothing jumped out as inaccurate or overstated, lots of caveats and hedging.
Now do the WHO.
Just looking this over, but not having more time to waste on it, it’s a poorly designed observational “study”
- No control group
- not randomized
- under-powered to draw any conclusions (just 1 case of adult-to-adult transmission in the “pods” - and this with 99% of adults masked, mind you; zero cases of adult to child, child to adult, or child to child transmission in the pods, with 55% of kids masking)
- their conclusion: minimal covid-19 transmission despite high community incidence and “variable adherence” to mitigation (emphasis added)
From this data you could conclude just about anything.
My takeaway would be that masks don’t make a difference for kids in school (or pods) who are just not efficient vectors of this disease, something that many European countries have concluded by looking at their experience of having open, maskless schools.
One could also ask if the adults & children were all wearing shoes. Maybe it was their foot coverings, not face coverings, that stopped covid. 
This “study” doesn’t answer this.
1 Like
Not the strongest evidence, I admit, but here’s a blog post from one of the many people who noticed the page go missing:
From my limited time trying to find it, it appeared in a Google search list but the link when clicked went to the AAP home page rather than the specific page that was shown.
It’s probably still in the wayback machine, but I didn’t put that much effort in.
You’re welcome to try to find it. If you do, I’ll be the first to say you proved me wrong.
My guess is that some parents are freaking out that caregivers are wearing masks.
I find the post you linked to hyperbolic. I know you meant it only as a kind of proof that the AAP had that other info graphic up, and maybe it does show that. But it also shows the kind of misplaced fear that requires the AAP to put out these kind of statements, and perhaps take down that graphic.
(And incidentally the woman making that post could have an md/phd, and that wouldn’t change my opinion of that post one bit. It’s not about who is making the statement. It’s about the statement itself.)
The AAP is trying to reassure parents. These are the same people who need to have it explained to them, evidently, that oxygen molecules are small enough to pass through masks. I don’t think that reflects the stupidity of parents. I think it reflects the nonsense misinformation propagating through the internet.
The larger message is probably: we know there is a virus going around that is hospitalizing or killing infants, particularly when caught at the same time as RSV. Worry about that. Stop worrying so much about the detrimental effects of masks, whatever they may be.
3 Likes
I think the treatment with the monoclonal antibody works best if it is started as early as possible. So while he might not be sick, he is infected and this treatment can help prevent him from even getting sick. True he might not every get sick but if he did develop symptoms he would be further down the line and the antibody treatment may be less helpful.