• Chipthemonk
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        10 months ago

        I didn’t realize there were so many tankies on Lemmy. Go live in your dystopian land. I’ll enjoy my personal liberties and high standards of life. Thanks!

      • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        and you should feel lucky that the west is so backwards, violent and bloodthirsty

        You really need to travel outside of your bubble sometime

      • Chipthemonk
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        10 months ago

        What you are linking was penned by Karla Soares-Weiser. That’s one fucking person against all the folk that actually wrote the article. Karla is just covering her ass because all the people like you are mad that the biggest and most respected journal came out saying that they don’t think masks make a different.

        Also, take your hyperbole shit and stick it up your ass.

        • Aaliyah1
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          10 months ago

          Except what she point out, as multiple people have, is that all the rct’s that that study look at are really only studying adherence to mask mandates, not mask themselves. They combined studies where people wore masks infrequently with ones where mask mandates were more complied with. Not to mention it ignores all mechanistic evidence, all of which points to masks working

          It’s literally just the conservative thing that has been done throughout the whole pandemic, where they refuse to wear masks, and then when Covid continues to spread exponentially, they throw their arms up and go “look, masks don’t work!” I’d say it’s the lack of compliance that’s the issue

          • Chipthemonk
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            10 months ago

            Your argument is tired and juvenile. It’s the classic “if only we masked up harder!”

            Look at places like Japan. COVID spread there like wildfire. I guess they didn’t mask hard enough? Haha. No. Masks didn’t make a fucking difference in the most compliant place in the world.

            Also, it’s not conservative versus liberal. Somehow masks got tied up in political theater, and now people like you use the mask to express your political affiliation. You love the mask because it expresses left wing to you, and you think that right wing is evil, so you become obsessed with masks. Maybe if we all recognized that one or the other side is not evil, and has no intrinsic connection to masks, we’d be better off.

            • Aaliyah1
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              10 months ago

              Okay glad to see you’ve stopped trying to defend the Cochrane stuff.

              Also what the fuck are you talking about? Japan was widely touted as a Covid success story. Including by conservatives who liked the fact that they never imposed a mask mandate.

              • Chipthemonk
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                10 months ago

                I am not stopping a defense of the Cochrane review. It’s the best current study we have and it announces that it’s not clear if masks work. If we don’t know if they work, why should governments keep mandating them? They shouldn’t. Full stop.

                Regarding Japan, here’s an article by the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/japan-covid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare they talk about Japan’s success. Notice how masks do not feature heavily in the article.

                Here’s another one that places your claim in doubt: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/japan-covid-19-pandemic-response-restrictions-two-years

                Finally, the total number of deaths in Japan and the US differ widely in large part because the two populations are, broadly, very different. COVID disproportionately effects overweight people. Ask anyone that worked in the hospitals during peak waves. The simple fact is that fat people don’t do well with Covid. Now ask yourself, is there an equal number of overweight people (%) in Japan to the US? No. People in Japan are far less overweight than people in the US. It’s no wonder, therefore, that the US fared worse because it’s population is move overweight.

                • Aaliyah1
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                  10 months ago

                  I am extremely confused as to what you intended to prove with those two links. Masks were not mentioned by either, the second link barely discussed Covid and seemed to focus on foreign relations, and both agreed Japan’s response was a success, which contradicts your implication that it somehow wasn’t. And the first guy says he was supportive of the government’s guidelines, which included masks. So unless there’s something else against masks that he said, I’m gonna extrapolate that he is not anti-mask.

                  Ok, I’m gonna just skip over the whole blaming overweight people part and ask you - do you believe overweight people are more likely to spread Covid? Because we’re discussing spread, do masks work to combat spread. Japan had lower deaths but they also had lower cases. Was it also due to overweight people that Covid cases, not deaths, were higher in the usa. And maybe a lower case load has something to do with the lower deaths in Japan, more than overweight people. Japan’s mask usage was always extremely high, even without a mandate, and remains so.

                  And if you want to continue the Cochrane stuff-it’s not a study. It’s a meta analysis of a bunch of studies, all of which were pretty well-known prior to the Cochrane study, and the problems with them were already recognized by those studies’ authors. So the Cochrane study just lumps a bunch of poor quality studies into one poor quality meta analysis that even the Cochrane study authors write is inconclusive and probably would not have made the splash it has if it was not done by a bunch of brownstone institute anti-maskers who decided to go on a press tour saying their study said something that it didn’t.

                  Not to mention we have mechanical filtration studies proving the physics of mask wearing, so unless there’s something mystical about Covid, these studies still apply.

                  • Chipthemonk
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                    10 months ago

                    The point of those links is to show that masks are not the answer.

                    Ultimately, we are concerned about COVID causing deaths and serious harm. It does this for overweight people. Other people don’t suffer nearly as badly and COVID typically presents as a mild to mid level cold or flu. Consequently, it’s really not as big of a deal as we’ve been making it out to be.

                    COVID sucked mostly because of poor policy. I lived in a Canadian city with a strict masking policy and high compliance. The spread of COVID was massive. The hospitals in Canada were full and fucked way before Covid, so a few extra admissions completely broke their fucked up system.

                    I’m no longer convinced the whole world had to shut down and mask up. COVID policy fucked over the economy and people’s’ well-being. It has especially negatively effected those most in need.

                    Ultimately, I think people should wear masks if it makes them comfortable. I find masks to be uncomfortable, ugly, and ultimately anti-human, because I think the face is an important part of humans. Some people don’t seem to think this, however, so I understand I might be among a minority.

                    Finally, isolated physical tests on masks don’t represent well what happens in the real world. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell wasn’t hermetically sealing the masks to my face and I didn’t see anyone else doing it either. The real-world usage simply wasn’t effective. It was political.

      • Chipthemonk
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        10 months ago

        Look at the date you dumb fuck. Then recognize that the Cochrane review is highly respected when it comes to public health science.

        You people are ridiculous.

        • lukini@beehaw.org
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          10 months ago

          You ever gonna respond to people telling you your posts are a misrepresentation or are you just gonna call people dumb fucks? Kinda hard to trust someone posting like this.

          • Chipthemonk
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            10 months ago

            I’ll happily respond to someone that refutes the Cochrane review in a logical and substantive way.

        • HackyHorse3000@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I know you’re being combative so it’s unlikely, but did you actually read both sources? One is a review of around 70 studies, before and during the pandemic, sonme unpublished. The other is a review of 5000 articles which found statistically significant results…

          • Chipthemonk
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            10 months ago

            The responded article says this:

            A total of 6 studies were included, involving 4 countries, after a total of 5,178 eligible articles were searched in databases and references.

            They literally typed some shit into the journal search database that had that many articles. They didn’t study all of those articles. Their study is founded exclusively from 6 studies. The Cochrane review’s approach is far more comprehensive and goes into considerably more depth in many more studies.

            So, maybe you didn’t read the articles? Or maybe you don’t understand population level, public health study methods.

            • HackyHorse3000@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Fair point, I did misread that. But it seems you’re acting in bad faith with just one source again. Any search amongst published articles provide evidence for the efficacy and cost effectiveness of masks as a adjunct preventative measure. It seems rather like cherry picking to trust the one place that goes against the grain, no?