Despite a court striking down the national mask mandate on public transportation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reinstated its recommendation that Americans wear masks on planes, trains, and buses.
Americans aged two and older should wear a well-fitting masks while on public transportation, including in airports and train stations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended, citing the current spread of coronavirus and projections of future COVID-19 trends.For months, the Transportation Security Administration had been enforcing a requirement that passengers and workers wear masks.The government had repeatedly extended the mandate, and the latest one had been set to expire May 3, but a federal judge in Florida struck down the rule on April 18.The same day, the TSA said it would no longer enforce the mandate.A CDC spokesperson said, ‘As a result of a court order, the mask order is no longer in effect and is not being enforced.’
However, an intriguing new study has been published showing that the data from 35 countries and 602 million people using face masks “failed to show a benefit” and “may have harmful unintended consequences.”
A new peer-reviewed study entitled: “Correlation Between Mask Compliance and COVID-19 Outcomes in Europe” has demonstrated that use of face masks, even widespread, did not correlate with better outcomes during the COVID epidemic, based on data from 35 European countries with populations of over one million people each, encompassing a total of 602 million people.The study noted that the average proportion of mask usage in the period investigated (October 2020 until March 2021) was 60.9% ± 19.9%.Governments and advisory bodies have recommended and often mandated the wearing of face masks in public spaces and in many areas mandates or recommendations remain in place, despite the fact, the study notes, that randomized controlled trials from prior to and during the epidemic have failed to show a benefit to the wearing of such masks with regard to COVID transmission….The study also noted that the public may have gained the impression that masks could be helpful due to the fact that mandates were usually implemented after the first peak of COVID cases had passed. However, it became evident that masks were not in fact helpful later that same year, when widespread mask usage does not appear to have mitigated the severity of the COVID wave of winter 2020.”Moreover,” the study concludes, “the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”
Correlation is not causation. Unhealthy people and the more vulnerable may have opted to mask at higher rates than the healthy and the young. However, face masks do not offer miracle protection from the virus.
Finally, recall that many officials asserted that contact with contaminated surfaces could result in covid transmission. A detailed, new study also refutes those claims.
University of Michigan researchers tested air and surface samples around their campus and found odds are greater for inhaling virus particles than picking them up on your fingers.”In this study, we set out to better understand potential exposures to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus — the virus which causes COVID-19 — in several college campus settings,” explained study author Richard Neitzel, a professor of environmental health sciences and global public health.The settings included offices, classrooms, performance spaces, cafeterias, buses and a gym. However, the samples were taken during the pandemic lockdown, so these were relatively empty spaces.”We also used information on campus COVID-19 infections to estimate the probability of infection associated with our environmental measurements,” added Neitzel.”The overall risk of exposure to the virus was low at all of the locations we measured,” he said.
When the final studies on covid are published, there will likely be one tragic conclusion: Never in history have so many been harmed by so few.
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