Oddly, you are making the claim I question here. This "proof that masks work" is likely more just proof that not having kids in schools cuts a lot of spread. I really cannot underscore enough how much more sick you will get when you have kids in school than when you don't.
And homeschool isn't really an answer here, sadly. It is fairly well documented that kids that come out of homeschool and finally enter a workforce or other social environment are at a heightened risk of sicknesses that the general populace just doesn't notice.
Edit: I hasten to add that I agree this is not an argument that masks don't work. And I don't understand why some folks still insist on fighting not to wear them.
Before we can have a debate about "masks" we have to define what masks are.
It's undeniably clear that wearing actual respirator N95 or ffp2 masks that are fit to the face work in preventing infection and spread. That's just physics. But when most are only wearing a partial covering "mask" that just blocks spittle of course it's not going to prevent infecting or infection by an aerosol spread disease.
The real problem with "masks" was that our governments' intentionally lied about the need for them at the start of the pandemic. The messaging never recovered from this and I imagine even if government health institutions stated the truth today, that face fit respirators are required, it'd just be ignored. The problem wasn't ever actual masks, it was people lying about them and people not wearing them.
Sure, unfit "masks" might have some mitigation potential and it's better than wearing nothing. But masks, in the context of an aerosol spread infection, have to mean fit respirator masks.
I think you also need to consider direction of spread. It is easy to see how spread from an individual is cut with masks. Spread to the individual is almost certainly affected, but to really cut it down, you almost certainly need gloves and a ton of hand washing going on.
But, again, I am /not/ arguing against masks. I fully agree that if you are sick, stay home and wear a mask when you do go out. My point is that much of the reduction is more easily explained with "stay home" than it was "a lot of folks were wearing masks." I further agree that both had an likely had an impact. But, just as having a more streamlined car will give you better gas mileage, if you are trying to make a bigger impact, you are almost certainly better focusing on buses than you are personal vehicles.
> This "proof that masks work" is likely more just proof that not having kids in schools cuts a lot of spread.
It is? I mean, something worked. You think the fact that flu deaths dropped to essentially zero for two years was exclusively due to school closures? Is there any evidence for that?
I'll admit to some individual dithering on the evidence for any given mitigation strategy. But clearly, on the whole, societal mitigations for covid worked very well to control disease. You admit that much, right? People freaked out about school closures too. They freaked out about distancing. They freaked out about travel restrictions. (also covid-specific rules like testing requirements, and vaccination programs). And it was, overall, the same people arguing against all this stuff that was, again, clearly working as evidenced by its effect on influenza and et. al.
So why did people argue so hard against exactly those (working!) mitigation strategies?
I did not mean my point to be that it was only school closures. My guess is that it was a combination of all items. I would just wager that school closures are the dominant factor.
I cannot underscore enough just how sick families get by having their kids in schools.
To your last point? I got nothing. At large, we were trying to make a bad situation better. The vehement arguing and digging in on not doing anything seems like it is really only going to make things worse.
I will also throw under the bus that it was a single thing that worked. Even my "I think it was largely the school closures" is banking that it is one of the largest factors, but I don't think it was large enough that it alone could accomplish what we did see.
Is there any evidence for that? This again seems like the kind of whataboutism designed to deflect and not engage.
Clearly what we did worked vs. the flu. So arguments that "what we did" was not effective vs. covid seem prima facie wrong. Right?
It's OK to argue at the margins about what the most effective strategies were, and I'm happy to engage on that. But almost everywhere I see this argument, it seems more like an attempt to paper over a historical refusal to accommodate any mitigation at all.
There's exactly as much evidence for that as there is for any other mitigation, which is to say none because the CDC has spent approximately 0 dollars trying to study any of them seriously. We're all just guessing.
And once again, that seems much more like an evasion to me than a debate. Something worked, per the influenza numbers. You admit that much, right? So, is it so weird to assume that the most obvious hypothesis (general social distancing and mask use) is correct? Must we go in circles of denial and redirection like this?
> Something worked, per the influenza numbers. You admit that much, right?
I admit that it's possible that something worked, but I don't even think that's a given. We don't know how covid and influenza interact, and perhaps covid is outcompeting it. I'm not at all a virologist and have only a vague understanding that this hypothesis exists, but just throwing it out there to say I'm not 100% convinced that something we did worked.
> So, is it so weird to assume that the most obvious hypothesis (general social distancing and mask use) is correct?
This is just begging the question. Why is mask use the most obvious hypothesis? To me the most obvious hypothesis is that by closing nursing homes to outside visitors we shut off the main vector by which new influenza infections enter the facilities.
And again, this is just both of us guessing, because we don't have data.
And homeschool isn't really an answer here, sadly. It is fairly well documented that kids that come out of homeschool and finally enter a workforce or other social environment are at a heightened risk of sicknesses that the general populace just doesn't notice.
Edit: I hasten to add that I agree this is not an argument that masks don't work. And I don't understand why some folks still insist on fighting not to wear them.