Level 3 masks protect no one from airborne illness. They are better source control than nothing, but they were never designed to prevent transmission of airborne illness, they were designed to protect the wearer from splashes of body fluids.

If the patient needs protection, ASTM level 3 isn’t it.

16/ that knowledge is still up for debate, even among liberals who ought to know (and believe) better. That's a shame.

15/ yet then conclude it doesn't work. We know covid interventions, performed properly & consistently over time, work both to reduce healthcare system overload & to keep individuals safer; it's disingenuous of anyone to suggest otherwise.

But based on this article, it seems like what we do with...

14/ threat to the success of PH efforts moving forward. It's an awfully long article to get through, only to have Karma land in the exact place that likely motivated the writing of the two books he critiques.

I agree with Karma that it's absurd either to perform or to assess an intervention badly,

13/ big assumptions about why American kids are poorly educated - a downward slide that hardly start with the pandemic).

But even more important, his assumption that public health should prioritize economy over lives (a là economist Emily Oster or her colleague Ashish Jha) is itself a profound...

12/ Whoa, there! 1st, his hyperbole is wholly unnecessary (the economy wasn't "ruined"; lives were lived; school kids didn't "never recover" - just look at the great testing stats out of NYC this year that I posted recently. & for a guy interested in interactions & confounds, Karma's making some...

11/ to this piece is in Karma's conclusion. After a decent explication of shortcomings of the two covid books he reviews, he then undermines his whole argument for NPI by concluding that, *despite* covid NPIs likely having been effective, they weren't worth the (economic, inconvenience) costs...

10/ to die & so, said "f** it" to non-pharma intervention. & as I, myself, have written, behavior was also profoundly affected by individuals' personal infection experience; in effect, this basically drove subject attrition all the way through the study period.)

But where I really take exception...

9/ this issue.

To be fair, Karma doesn't ignore it entirely (see below); he just doesn't acknowledge that it was so pervasive - affecting even pro-NPI segments of the population (esp. after vaccines became available & white Americans read the stats that they were far less likely than other folks...

8/ supervising parents, &, for kids of low SES, *a lack of computers & internet.*

You can't blame the intervention if people can't access it or refuse to comply (& aren't forced to), but I've yet to see anyone in MSM fully acknowledge that any retrospective pandemic NPI assessment is hobbled by...

7/ on/removed my mask in accordance with best practice (& didn't keep putting my fingers all over the damn thing, while wearing it). Kids who were "distance learning" often didn't learn, but no one points out that it wasn't distance learning at fault, but resistant teachers, unobservant...

6/ who were supposed to stay home didn't (my own neighbors had massive parties straight through my state's "lockdown"); likewise, folks didn't distance effectively. They didn't mask consistently, let alone properly - noses were on display everywhere, & I'm probably the only person I knew who put...

5/ to me, an issue greater than these specific methodological ones (such as researchers not identifying intervention groups & periods properly) has always been the refusal, by almost everyone, to acknowledge that in basically no cases were covid intervention procedures followed properly. People...

4/ executed.

To his credit, Karma points out cases where intervention impact was almost surely underestimated, for various reasons - for ex., as when older folks in Florida sequestered & wore masks on their own after mandates fell (& so the time period was incorrectly framed as post-NPI). But...

3/ author himself touches on, is that the assumption that NPIs didn't work is, itself, deeply flawed. He works through several reasons, but for me, the one that's always been most compelling is one he barely notes: that you can't accurately assess the value of an intervention that's not properly...

2/ remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around."

That's undoubtedly true, but to me, it sounds a little "the ends justify the means"-ish, & I think there are far better arguments to be made in favor of early covid NPI policies.

The main one, which the...

There are people who have been suggesting this as a possibility as far back as 2020. No one wanted to hear it then, and there was no data to support it bc there hadn’t been enough infections.

Now there have been. It’s one of those things where the people who said early won’t be happy to be right.

Leitner "wonders whether the virus leaves lasting scars on the immune system’s T cell defences. 'But that’s just (my) hypothesis,' he emphasises in an email." Lasting scars from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Considering what we know about Long Covid, this is such an intriguing idea (& very worrisome).