New Study: Mask Mandates Associated With INCREASED Covid Death Rate

Townhall.com ^ | 5 June A.D. 2022 | Scott Morefield

[Jim Noble]

I am very familiar with the Kansas data (which is old), and many studies like it.

None of them (to my knowledge) try to measure mask WEARING as opposed to mask MANDATES.

Mask MANDATES are a political issue, and rightly so, but they don’t tell you how many people, of what age ranges, wore masks in indoor public areas during times of sustained transmission. Many people in non-mandate areas, especially the elderly, wore masks and many people in mandate areas, especially minorities in Southern California, never wore masks.

So all the papers flowing out of the Kansas counties dataset tell you nothing about the effect of masks on transmission.

Do you know how many randomized cluster trials CDC has done on this question since February 2020?

Zero.

[lightman]

Bingo.

During the “lockdown” I was outside nearly every day sectioning and splitting a huge ash tree that had fallen a couple of weeks earlier.

All of the free Vitamin D was a bonus.

[dsrtsage]

Can’t we just mandate democrats wear masks so we do not have to look at their ugly mugs and stupid nose rings?

[SharpRightTurn]

“Funny with all the billions the CDC has they can’t put a few million into proving the efficacy of masks with a RCT.”

Yes, funny about that. It’s almost like they are afraid of what the study might reveal and that they might not be able to deep-six the study.

[sbnsd]

bkmk

[WhattheDickens?]

Ping

[TChad]

Killer mask ping.

[consult]

The reason medicine is first do no harm....yet we suddenly mandated masks in 2020 when they had long been proven ineffective.

HERE IS A SUMMARY OF THIS ARTICLE

• An observational study aimed to determine whether mandatory mask use influenced the case fatality rate in Kansas, USA between August 1st and October 15th 2020 concluded that “results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates” (Medicine. 2022;101(7):e28924 doi: 10.1097/MD.0000000000028924). The risk for the individual wearing the mask should even be higher, because there is an unknown number of people who either do not obey mask mandates, are exempted for medical reasons or do not go to public places where mask mandates are in effect. The mask mandates themselves have increased the CFR by 1.85 / 1.58 or by 85% / 58% in counties with mask mandates. It was also found that almost all of these additional deaths were attributed solely to COVID-19. Therefore, this number is most likely underestimated and depends to a large extent on the percentage of people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 but did not die with COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death. Other studies have described that 15% of patients with COVID-19 infection died from decompensation due to other pathologies and the cause of death was unrelated to severe complications of COVID-19. Kansas, with over 2.8 million residents was used for comparison because the state allowed each of its 105 counties to decide whether or not to implement mask mandates, with 81 counties deciding against the measure. This study applied secondary data on case updates, mask mandates, and demographic status related to Kansas State, USA. A parallelization analysis based on county-level data was conducted on these data. Results were controlled by performing multiple sensitivity analyses and a negative control. These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention. A rationale for the increased RR by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets, hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration. In the “Foegen effect,” the virions spread (because of their smaller size) deeper into the respiratory tract. They bypass the bronchi and are inhaled deep into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis, which would be typical of a virus infection.

The “Foegen effect” theory suggest that deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions caught in facemasks as droplets can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. While the “Foegen effect” is proven in vivo in an animal model, further research is needed to fully understand it. The fundamentals of this effect are easily demonstrated when wearing a facemask and glasses at the same time by pulling the upper edge of the mask over the lower edge of the glasses. Droplets appear on the mask when breathing out and disappear when breathing in. The use of “better” masks (e.g., FFP2, FFP3) with a higher droplet-filtering capacity probably should cause an even stronger “Foegen effect” because the number of virions that are potentially re-inhaled increases in the same way that outward shedding is reduced.

[Tymesup]

Would there be more mask wearing in the mandate counties and cities than in the no mandate locations?

Hmm, while the study tried to create similar populations, did it recognize that maskers might behave differently from non-maskers? For instance, there may be differences in HCQ, Ivermectin and vitamin D.

[Jim Noble]

Would there be more mask wearing in the mandate counties and cities than in the no mandate locations?

It's the researcher's job to find that out - but they didn't.