People tend to deny a simple truth about the world: it's all about probability and outcome (watch the 1978 movie "Heaven Can Wait" for an amusing take). Your question, in my mind, has been asked and the outcome provides the answer: populations where the societal norm was to wear a mask (no matter how effective) did much better than those lacking that norm.
People tend to deny a simple truth about the world: it's all about probability and outcome (watch the 1978 movie "Heaven Can Wait" for an amusing take). Your question, in my mind, has been asked and the outcome provides the answer: populations where the societal norm was to wear a mask (no matter how effective) did much better than those lacking that norm.
While that is a widely believed claim, it is actually incorrect.
Of the countries which tracked excess deaths, South Korea, praised for their mask culture, had among the highest excess death rates in the world (+15%), ranking 5th highest excess deaths out of the 36 countries tracked.
By contrast, he Nordic countries, which had the least mask adherence in the world, all place at the bottom (average of +5% with Sweden (+3.5%) and Norway (+5.4%) holding the lowest increases in deaths.
This claim can be replicated with the data at mortality.org which pools from each countries CDC equivalent.
You're mixing apples and oranges here with mortality data and case spread. But re. mortality, are your claims accounting for age-adjustment as well as prevalence of co-morbidities? Also wondering about how new this all still is. Current studies are showing several potential long-range outcomes from infection. It may take a few more years to see how this pans out in coronary and pulmonary disease as well as cognitive disorders.
Mortality data is the only metric which isn't influenced by unknown confounders, bias, testing rates, etc.
It's a simple and reliable metric to judge population level impact, and was often cited in the MSM in 2020 and 2021 when the early numbers were backing their claims that Sweden was doing it wrong, South Korea doing it right. Now that the data no longer supports that hypothesis, excess death hasn't been cited as much it seems.
I would love to have more detail on comorbidities from these countries and get to go through line-by-line through the death records like we can with CDC, but that information isn't available.
As for the question "well what about the long term consequences", I propose something obvious - if a country has high mortality like South Korea, that country will have a corresponding spike in whatever indirect/long term effects there are. It seems silly to propose that while the masks in South Korea didn't stop them from having a record breaking 100% increase in deaths Spring of 2022, the masks may somehow save them from Long Covid.
People tend to deny a simple truth about the world: it's all about probability and outcome (watch the 1978 movie "Heaven Can Wait" for an amusing take). Your question, in my mind, has been asked and the outcome provides the answer: populations where the societal norm was to wear a mask (no matter how effective) did much better than those lacking that norm.
While that is a widely believed claim, it is actually incorrect.
Of the countries which tracked excess deaths, South Korea, praised for their mask culture, had among the highest excess death rates in the world (+15%), ranking 5th highest excess deaths out of the 36 countries tracked.
By contrast, he Nordic countries, which had the least mask adherence in the world, all place at the bottom (average of +5% with Sweden (+3.5%) and Norway (+5.4%) holding the lowest increases in deaths.
This claim can be replicated with the data at mortality.org which pools from each countries CDC equivalent.
You're mixing apples and oranges here with mortality data and case spread. But re. mortality, are your claims accounting for age-adjustment as well as prevalence of co-morbidities? Also wondering about how new this all still is. Current studies are showing several potential long-range outcomes from infection. It may take a few more years to see how this pans out in coronary and pulmonary disease as well as cognitive disorders.
Mortality data is the only metric which isn't influenced by unknown confounders, bias, testing rates, etc.
It's a simple and reliable metric to judge population level impact, and was often cited in the MSM in 2020 and 2021 when the early numbers were backing their claims that Sweden was doing it wrong, South Korea doing it right. Now that the data no longer supports that hypothesis, excess death hasn't been cited as much it seems.
I would love to have more detail on comorbidities from these countries and get to go through line-by-line through the death records like we can with CDC, but that information isn't available.
As for the question "well what about the long term consequences", I propose something obvious - if a country has high mortality like South Korea, that country will have a corresponding spike in whatever indirect/long term effects there are. It seems silly to propose that while the masks in South Korea didn't stop them from having a record breaking 100% increase in deaths Spring of 2022, the masks may somehow save them from Long Covid.