Here’s a question for you, brought to you by propagandists: “Could permanent masks in public become Vic policy?”
And here’s the headline: “Could wearing masks in public be the answer to Victoria’s Covid death rises? Researchers think so”.
Researchers is, of course, another word for Experts.
Wearing masks all the time when outside the home during Covid waves could be the best way of preventing deaths, new Melbourne research shows.
In findings that the University of Melbourne research team says could help inform Victorian mask policy in the future, it’s been shown consistent face covering — as opposed to just during peaks — would reduce Covid mortality by 25 per cent over 12 months.
Suppose these Experts’ research, unlike most efforts, is saying the truth about Reality. I checked the official stats, and in all Australia on 1 August there was credited one (1) coronadoom death. Which is to say one (1) associated death. Officials don’t come out and say direct death: just “associated”. If everybody wore a mask, that guy yesterday (I’m assuming it’s a guy) would only be mostly dead.
Here’s the day-to-day associated deaths (overlaid with a useless and distracting model):
The wintertime peak—Down Under is just coming out of their winter—was about 35 deaths on one day. A quarter of that is 8 (rounded to one full human being).
So everybody wearing masks all the time forever into perpetuity would have, Researcher’s model says, saved 8 lives on peak days. Recall we are supposing this is true, even though it’s unbelievable.
The glorious saving effects of masks would not be as high as 8 next winter peak, though. Not if we extrapolate the picture above, which shows, and shows clearly, doom deaths are on the way down, even without mandatory masks. For whatever reason, the Aussie government only reports the total for 2021 (and not 2022), which was 1,122 doom deaths (that I could discover). Associated deaths. 2022 looked to be higher, and 2023 looks more like 2021. And surely 2024 will be lower year.
We don’t need the exact number; its order will do. Because if saving lives is our top goal, and what could be more important!, then we could save even more lives by banning driving.
Or requiring people to drive 25% less.
About 1,200 people died in traffic accidents in Australia last year, a number that is pretty consistent, according to official numbers. This 1,200 will be about the same number who die of the doom in 2023, and likely more than will croak from it in 2024.
To within some low margin of error, then, banning driving, or mandating a 25% reduction in driving, would save at least as many, and likely even more, lives as making going without a mask a crime—assuming there is no error in the mask model. And these would be younger lives, too, since the doom still preferentially kills the old and accidents the young.
So if saving lives is our top priority, and how can it not be when we are guided by a effeminate Cult of Safety First!, there is no excuse. We must ban driving, or greatly curtail it. (Which they are probably thinking of.)
Anyway, this all assumes the mask study has value. Which it does not.
The peer-reviewed paper is “Consistent mask use and SARS?CoV?2 epidemiology: a simulation modelling study”, by Joshua Szanyi and others in The Medical Journal of Australia.
They say “We recently reported the results of an integrated epidemiologic and economic agent-based model that assessed the costs and benefits of more than one hundred coronavirus disease…”
Now an “agent-based model” is exactly as it sounds. It is a model having “agents” doing exactly what they are told to do. The same kind of model (as we document in the Price of Panic) was used to “prove” social distancing “saved lives.”
In other words, you tell the “agents”, as it were, that social distancing or masking works, then you run the model, and, lo, it turns out social distancing and masks work! You then announce “Our computer models predict masking (social distancing) saves lives.”
The propaganda put it this way:
Researcher Samantha Howe said: “If a highly virulent variant of SARS-CoV-2 were to emerge in the next year or so, our modelling supports widespread mask wearing throughout the wave – not just at the peak of the wave.”
The modelling — which simulated the population of Victoria to investigate whether the likelihood of contracting Covid was reduced by wearing a mask at all times outside the home — showed more deaths were prevented if all age groups wore masks, all the time, not just the elderly and frail.
Garbage. All of it. But it’s still The Science.
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We sure want to visit Australia, New Zealand and Fiji next year. Along with other places on our travel list. There’s no way we will spend money to go somewhere where we have to wear masks.
We just returned from India and those who wanted to wear masks could. Almost no one did. And we prefer it that way.
Here’s a short video extract showing first a test of FFP2 masks and second how their efficacy has been tested for certification.
The second part clearly shows that masks are highly effective, if you seal the border airtight and it even shows how exactly to do it. Its just it was nowhere to be found on the instructions sheet
https://youtu.be/jWUOP8-nDUM
(It is in german, but you can switch to english subtitles in settings)
My university degree is physics so not a lot of expertise in stats. I did have an experience in model failure due to not testing outside the training data. I was the one suggesting the testing and was laughed at because the model created by the “experts”. Somebody took my advice though and discovered an error in the model. Keep up the good work Mr. Briggs, I enjoy it greatly.
There would be fewer traffic fatalities if there were no cars. Expect to see this soon in formerly great Britain.
Somebody approaches me wearing a mask outdoors in July I’m at yellow. If they have a mask and hoodie I go from yellow to orange.
For the last three years, I’ve seen graph after graph after graph, from the U.S., Europe, Britain, Asia, and Australasia, illustrating the fact that the up-and-down curve of Kung-Flu cases, hospitalizations, and deaths does what it’s going to do, regardless of whether mask use is widespread or there is no masking at all. Masks absolutely do not do a damned thing. It’s hard for a rational person to understand why these idiots keep insisting on them. However, even if they did stop the spread of respiratory viruses (which they do not), I don’t give a damn. I’d take my chances, just like I do with driving a car or walking down a street in Los Angeles. F masks, it’s over, I’m done with it.
Kenyan Meyer — I watched that video. You’re an idiot.
Mr. Meyer — I just realized you may have been joking. Sealing the mask edges with modeling clay was pretty funny.
Richard Brimage – Ok, I’ll bite. Why was a model created that was intended to work on only the training data? The only possible purpose for such a thing that I can think of would be if the training data is massive and the “model” serves as an efficient look-up table?
This also ignores, as most ‘research’ of this type does, that there is no cost associated with their prescriptions. Mask wearing has much better supported health detriments. There is a health cost to wearing masks, one not considered. Likewise, your auto contra example, there is a cost to not being able to get places quickly. Move to some rural area 100 miles from the nearest hospital and have a heart attack to find out.
Actually it should have been simple. It had to do with correcting for attenuation of measurements of gamma rays through various thicknesses of steel. I think the “experts” were a little over confident of their modeling abilities.