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When vaccines work they are usually great at stopping the spread. For the original strain of covid, for example, it both stopped symptoms **and** stopped the spread.
The new variants however (such as delta, the most prevalent one, and omicron) it is either completely in effective or significantly less effective (hard to draw firm conclusions off what studies we have). The point is, its not effective at stopping the spread because the spike protein it encodes for is different in the variants and thus the antibodies are ineffective to a significant degree (if not completely).
yea masks im not sure about. The data in them are questionable in either direction so we can only speculate about how or if they are effective.
I think if you are very strict in how you use them they probably help, but most people, almost no one, handles mask with the level of rigor needed for them to be effective.
ofc it is not randomised but it is hard to do that with a pandemic disease
Ok then ill have to read, my cursory glance didnt seem to see anything about face touching in their model.
Though regardless if its non-randomized observational study it still has the underlying issue of confounding and thus the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. But ill give it a full read to give a more proper answer
At a cursory glance i took leakage to mean particles that escape out of the side. Not the effects of people taking off their mask and touching it and their face constantly.
I am not seeing anything to address any of the concerns i brought up such as:
* face touching
* constantly pulling the face down to your chin (spreading infection around your face)
* mask reuse
* exposing just the nose
* confounding between mask users and other good habits
* addressing post hoc ergo procter hoc through use of causality tests
etc.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tbed.14094 though i cant find any information if it is peer reviewed
Pressuming this study is correct (as you say it doesnt look like it is peer reviewed) then it may be fair to say people touch their face less. But it doesnt negate the other points such as pulling ones mask down to drink infecting both their chin and hands in doing so,
How many times a day does someone take a sip of water? Each of those times is a touch event and it appears this study isnt really counting those.
In general I'd expect eating and drinking in general, with a virus laiden mask on your face you need to handle (not to mention your now infected chin) to be rather risky.
If people tossed the mask and washed their face **and** hands before eating it might be much safer, but drinking, since it happens so often, seems particularly risky with a mask.
