About that new study saying that masks are great - Printable Version

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About that new study saying that masks are great - burger - 06-12-2020

There's a new study in PNAS saying that masks can dramatically reduce virus transmission.  It's gotten tons of press.

And it seems to be crap.  I have only had a chance to skim the study, but this thread (from a Stanford postdoc) is absolutely damning.  Not only should this paper be retracted*, but there should be a full review by the journal of their review procedures to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

[tweet]https://twitter.com/NoahHaber/status/1271518754627678208[/tweet]

If you don't want to read through the whole thread, I'll just mention one thing: there are no statistics or p-values in the entire paper.  None.

* I know that there has been chatter here before that "scientific freedom" or something means that papers widely viewed as wrong should not be retracted.  I still do not see how improperly analyzed data makes the scientific process better.  Retraction is the best thing for fatally flawed papers like this one.  Especially when published in a good journal.

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