Inaccurate Study Claims More Masking Would Have Stopped COVID

There's no end to the misinformation on masks. 

As we rapidly approach 2025, nearly five years after the start of the pro-mask flip-flop, there has yet to be a study or new piece of evidence showing that masks are effective against respiratory viruses. Decades of research pre-2020 all led to one inescapable conclusion: masks don't work. 

Data on mask wearing compliance, mask mandates, and gold standard evidence reviews post-2020 have all confirmed what we already knew. Yet a committed group of activists who refuse to admit they were wrong have continued down a desperate path, flailing after any glimmer of hope showing that their political ideology wasn't wrong.

Another example of this remarkable pattern was just published in Nature, a formerly prestigious medical journal. Nature, like so many other scientific publications, long abandoned its previous goals in favor of protecting the socially correct set of COVID-related views. The lab leak was a racist conspiracy theory, schools should close, masks work, vaccines stop the spread of the virus, mandates are necessary, lockdowns had no ancillary consequences – the usual platter of inaccurate nonsense.

Clearly though, after being proven wrong on every major issue, they're ready to come back for more.

A general view of Team ROC's masks during a postponement prior to the Women's Preliminary Round Group A match due to COVID-19 testing issue against Team Canada at Wukesong Sports Centre on February 07, 2022 in Beijing, China.  (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

New Nature Study Claims More Masking Would Have Prevented COVID

One of the primary arguments of the pro-mask fanatics is that more masking would have prevented COVID from spreading. That despite mandates and strict penalties for non-compliance, there were simply too many people not wearing masks during the pandemic.

This is, of course, contradicted by observational information and survey data, as well as on-the-ground reports from countries like South Korea and Japan where masking was universal. Not to mention domestic cities like Los Angeles, which conducted their own spot checks.

We know that these assertions are absurd for many reasons, but specifically because South Korea, despite their masking, has the highest confirmed cumulative case rate of any large country on earth. Roughly 68% of the country's entire population has tested positive for COVID, despite 99% compliance.

Regardless, the efforts to undermine continue. That's where this Nature article comes in.

The study claims to evaluate what would have happened "if everyone in the United Kingdom had worn high-grade masks during the COVID-19 pandemic."

How did it do this? You guessed it, modeling.

Richard Sear from the University of Surrey in the UK "developed a model of transmission," which he then used to form the underlying assumptions built into the model. And sure enough, Sear told the model to assume that "high-grade masks" like N95's or FFP2's were extremely effective at stopping COVID. 

Well, when you tell a model what to do, it's pretty darn good at doing it. 

Sear used app data from the UK National Health Service COVID-19 app, which logged information about infections and the amount of time that people who used the app spent around each other. He took that data, incorporated incorrect estimates of mask efficacy, and spit out the jaw-dropping results. If everyone had worn "high-grade masks," he claims, the "rate of COVID-19 transmission would have dropped by a factor of nine."

A factor of nine!

What a miracle that would have been! How amazing would it have been for society and for the UK to reduce COVID transmission by a factor of nine! If only some country had actually mandated N95 or higher-grade masks across populations to test this hypothesis.

Oh wait, a few did.

Germany mandated medical grade masks in early 2021, and N95's in certain situations later on that year. So many people wore them that The Atlantic wrote a glowing review of how Germany's mask culture and science following on N95's and vaccine passports were helping them beat COVID.

Except, naturally, COVID cases exploded immediately afterwards, obliterating all previous records in fully masked Germany.

Austria tried this experiment too, mandating surgical masks and N95's. That didn't work either.

This is the problem with the Nature study, as has been the problem with so many other pro-mask studies. They're based on fantasies.

Masks don't work, high grade masks don't work, so developing a model based on the assumption that they do is going to create inaccurate results. We know they're inaccurate because reality shows us they are. Compliance didn't matter, higher quality N95-level masks didn't matter.

None of it worked, because as science confirmed before politics took over, masks don't work. No amount of desperation or reality-denying modeling can change that. It's certainly not going to stop the pro-mask fanatics from trying though.