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Shoveltusker's avatar

Great post! I too hate masks and especially hate their effect on communication and socialization. Every year we get 36 new 19-y.o. students in our design studio-based degree program, and it's a very interactive program. A very strong and enduring sense of community always develops among the class, but the class of Fall 2020 is an exception. They just never really have "clicked" as a group. Another weird thing: when I see those guys around the building (now maskless of course), I often don't recognize them, because I spent the first two semesters (Fall 2020 and Spring 2021) never seeing their faces.

Something I keep noticing: a great many colleagues here at the university seem to have been very, very attached to the idea of mask mandates and also the idea of remote teaching/meeting as a reasonable alternative to in-person interaction at the university. Not sure what's going on here. It seems like some amalgam of excessive "safetyism" (all precautions are unquestionably a good thing; not gonna even talk about downsides) and rationalization (from the comfort of my home office, as opposed to my office in that big building several miles away, I insist that remote teaching is working just fine).

It always seemed to me that masks were probably helpful for protection from coughing or sneezing people. I'm guessing this is why transmission of other communicable diseases like seasonal flu dropped off in the masky era. But even at the outset, I thought mask mandates outdoors on campus were silly. These were of course, not opinions based on science, but rather on intuition.

But I'm just sayin': my intuition works pretty well sometimes. Remote teaching was a massive fail. This seemed blastingly obvious to me from the start, for so many reasons, not the least of which being the total breakdown of peer-learning (design studios heavily rely on this as pedagogy). But for the entirety of 2021—both semesters—in-person teaching was optional, and the majority of instructors stayed home. I pretty much had the Design building to myself (and the parking lot, which was nice, haha!).

Maybe I'm a cynic, but I suspect there were very powerful motivational undercurrents around here during the COVID epoch. People are complicated, I always say, so it is a mistake to write them off for some presumed devious motivation. People make choices and take stances for a whole array of reasons. In any case I see circumstantial evidence that remote teaching was very much grounded in convenience (at great unacknowledged cost for teaching and learning), and that mask-wearing eventually became at least partly a sort of uniform or "signifier" of allegiance, a political act and a desire to assert control.

We are a "University of Science and Technology", but "science" had kind of gone into hiding.

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The 21st Century Salonnière's avatar

One way to get people to think more like scientists would be to encourage them to be very skeptical of medical and science reporting, even about something that seems so science-y, so cut and dried, and so respectable on the surface as a Cochrane review.

I’ve been reading faulty health and medical reporting for too many decades to think health decisions should be made by each of us based on what we read in the media.

I’ll just hit a couple little points because no one wants to hear my whole spiel:

I object to the media’s takeaway message from the Cochrane review that “masks don’t work.”

Maybe it’s true that “masks don’t work” if you wear them incorrectly or wear them in situations where you don’t need them (eg, the beach; or a meeting room with an open window; or you expect kindergartners to wear them all day long).

You make a good point about “the army you have” Mari, and also: The army would not be hard to train to be more effective with good public health messaging. I cannot emphasize this enough: This is such a solvable problem. It would not be hard to teach people:

1. What kind of masks work?

N95 or KN95

2. How are they properly worn?

a. Choose a size that is fits close to your face.

b. Press the metal adjustable band so it fits closely around your nose.

c. If the mask moves in and out a bit with your breathing, that’s a good enough fit (and will probably avoid glasses fog).

3. When should I wear one, in a way that makes a difference to myself and the community?

This is a judgment call, but in general for a healthy person, the answer is “crowded indoor poorly ventilated spaces where you’ll be for a long time.“ Examples:

subway at rush hour

crowded lecture call

standing-room-only jury selection room

That’s about ALL people need to know or understand. It would be so easy to teach people what’s effective.

Maybe in fact “masks are very effective” if you choose the right time, place, mask, and method of wearing them, which is as simple as I just laid out. And not just great for the wearer; great for the wider community (as epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina pointed out last week in her substack post about the Cochrane review):

“even if masks only reduce the risk of transmission for each individual by a small fraction, when a community masks, those small effects compound exponentially across a population, making a big dent in cases. Just like compounding interest—a small change in the percentage makes a big difference down the road.”

https://open.substack.com/pub/yourlocalepidemiologist/p/do-masks-work?r=r6z4&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

To me it’s a shame (more than a shame) when the information is presented through the lens of a media who say things like “Look! Masks don’t work!”

Is anything that simple?

Why did health care workers stop dying when they figured out the right PPE to wear in covid units (before the vaccines)?

And as I pointed out on a different substack last night, asking whether masks work makes as much sense as asking whether vitamins work: which vitamins? in what form? taken when? how much? for how long? for what purpose?

This Cochrane review jumbled too many things together with predictable results. If you jumbled together all the research on “whether vitamins work,” you’d come up with a big, correct “no,” but you’d also miss — in that same jumble— the fact that even if most vitamins truly don’t live up to their claims, vitamin K shots do prevent bleeding conditions in newborns.

The answer to sweeping questions (do masks work? do vitamins work?) will almost always be no. The answer to specific questions (do well-fitted N95s in close quarters prevent covid infection? do vitamin K shots prevent bleeding in newborns?) is often more interesting.

And while we’re waiting for better treatments and preventatives for covid, which I believe are coming, wearing “well-fitted N95s in close quarters” in targeted commonsense situations is something we can do not just for ourselves but others.

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