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Originally Posted by texassapper
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First, this study just included data from a 6 month period during the winter of 2020/2021. Second, his correlation between mask usage and COVID cases probably should be tossed out the window because of widely varying levels of testing and reporting between countries. So that leaves you with the death rates.
Norway and Denmark skewed his results. The have the lowest death rates save Belarus, and who's going to trust Belarus' numbers anyway. And Norway and Denmark also had the lowest level of average mask usage. People back then were attributing Norway and Denmark's "success" to their lockdowns, and also ready availability of tests that enabled people to know when they were infectious so they could stay home. In other words, while Beny Spira, the author (associate professor at University of Sao Paulo) thinks he's looking at a correlation between mask usage and COVID mortality, maybe he's actually looking at a correlation between mask usage and lockdowns and testing.
Spira says that mask compliance was higher in Eastern Europe, as were death rates in Eastern Europe. Maybe you could attribute part of that to lower quality health care in the east. Also, I remember that some countries in eastern Europe, like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, were the first to mask up and showed low incidence of deaths initially, particularly compared to Italy and Spain. Maybe going into the six month period that this study covered, eastern Europe had less immunity from infection as a result of masking up early on.
That said, yes, maybe I should be eating a tiny bit of crow. I still maintain that if people had been wearing good quality masks (preferably KN95 or N95), including when around family members, during the waves and until vaccinated, lives would have been saved and the economy and our national debt wouldn't have suffered as much.
About your point in another post, I don't believe it makes sense to throw away N95 masks after a single wearing. Back when there was a shortage, I was baking mine to sterilize them, and never suffered any ill effects. Actually accept for one nasal infection, probably bacterial from picking my nose too much, I haven't had a single cold since COVID started, maybe because of the masks and vaccines, which might provide some immunity against other coronaviruses besides COVID-19. I used to have 2 or 3 colds a year.
This is the actual paper:
https://www.cureus.com/articles/9382...f%20COVID%2D19.