Day 1017: Yet Another Bad Mask Study

Of course, it's about masks. The NEJM paper is about an observational study of Boston schoolchildren, so it's been especially newsworthy here in Massachusetts. Vinay Prasad brought in Tracy Høeg to debunk the thing:

In the Boston study, the identified masking effect size against cases that is implausibly high. They say the dropping of the mask mandates corresponded with an additional 11,901 cases, which was 33.4% of ALL cases in the unmasked districts. Among the staff they found 40.4% of the cases to be attributable to the lifting of the mask mandates.

This is unrealistic considering most cases come from the community into the school AND we have a randomized study from Bangladesh failing to find any effect of either community or cloth masking in anyone under 50 (and that signal was modest, at around 11% decrease rate with surgical masks, which was uncertain, and no significant decrease with cloth masks). We also have a regression discontinuity design study from Spain which takes advantage of the fact that 5-year-olds don’t mask and 6 year old do and there was no significant discontinuity from age 5-6 as compared with other ages to suggest an effect of masking on case rates.

Additionally, the authors of the Boston study made the difficult-to-understand choice of “consider[ing] community rates of COVID-19 as part of the causal effect of school masking policies rather than a source of bias” in other words they saw community case rates to be a result of school masking policies/school case rates rather than community case rates to be the major source of school cases. A large body of research has suggested the opposite finding COVID-19 in schools is up to 10-20x more likely to come from outside of the school than from within. This includes a study from the UK where children <12 were not masked.

But they did plot the results of school COVID cases vs community covid cases and, as you can see here: [graph omitted] school case rates had a similar relationship to city/town case positivity rates in all districts, with all school case rates similar in relation to that of the community, which speaks against any large impact of school masking. Further, it is unclear why cases would be presumed to be coming from the school to the community with the school peak lagging the community peak in two of the districts or why any difference seen in the masked district would be presumed to be due to masks when the March 17 and the did not lift groups appear so similar in the difference between school (black) and community (orange) case rates. Looking overall at how much the mask district differs from the community compared with the unmasked districts, it’s clear the difference is modest---and of course may not be attributable to masks!

They both note the paper's strange focus on structural racism.

Day 1005: Amnestesia

The response to Emily Oster's recent plea in The Atlantic for a COVID-craziness amnesty went over surprisingly poorly. She got ratioed on Twitter for her forgive-and-forget stance, and all the usual suspects blogged their implacable opposition to letting anyone off the hook for criminal COVID insanity.

Mathew Crawford recaps some of the posts qua Apology Games (the lack of an apology being the first thing that comes up in criticism's of Oster's amnestesia), notably Eugyppius' salty take and Vinay Prasad's "narcissistic fence-sitting". Eugyppius was actually harsher than Crawford lets on:

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

But of course the bad cat has the saltiest take:

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise for so doing.

otherwise, you're just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed.

ignorance of the law is [no] excuse. neither is ignorance of ethics or epidemiology.

P.S. Not to be outdone, Eugyppius goes another round against Emily Oster and her fellow "Head Girls":

One of the reasons things like lockdowns and mass vaccination frenzies have become possible in the first place, is the uniformity of outlook and opinion among the governing elite. When everybody, from university professors to the minister president of Bavaria to municipal police administrators, believes that with enough social distancing we can eradicate SARS-2, and that the unvaccinated are responsible for prolonging the pandemic, the result is a powerful if erratic and ever-shifting social tyranny. Social media technologies have been particularly noxious for the consensus formation of the Head Girls, widening the range of issues on which they have functionally identical opinions and enforcing conformity more thoroughly than was ever before possible. And should one of their runaway preference cascades go off the rails and destroy society, they’ll rapidly reunite around the new consensus position, that nobody could’ve known any better and all the worst offenders—especially their friends and colleagues—acted in good faith with the knowledge that was available at the time.

P.P.S. Cartoonist Bob Moran also has something to say: