Thank you, and with my layman's understanding of the issues, I agree (fwiw). I have to note how sad it seems that your answer requires a bit more honesty than I see around reddit and elsewhere...
Very frustrating how everything gets so polarized these days and often everyone is wrong in large part because they don't have enough humility to recognize what you wrote in your very first paragraph: "understanding that the answers have some amount of uncertainty is the mark of good scientists. "
Thank you for the entirety of your answer, very helpful
Regarding this
> You also need time, space, and money to do such an experiment, and in 2020 that would not have been an ethical experiment so it could not be done. It MIGHT be an ethical experiment in 2023 with the current variants of COVID, but even that is unclear.
I am curious what the ethical issues you see are, and if they are alleviated with the use of informed, healthy volunteers....
If an RCT of masks is not ethical, what are the ethics of a mask mandate especially on young children?
believe it or not, I really wasn't trying to make this about masks themselves, but I was intrigued when I heard a scientist mentioning that some tests can't be blinded but that there were alternatives, what he was referring to
the claim is made that unless you are testing masks in real life, for example on kids going to school and playing all day, sometimes wearing masks and sometimes not, you really aren't testing masks in any meaningful way that matters in terms of how kids will use them.
DenebianSlimeMolds OP t1_j9wa5nx wrote
Reply to comment by Romarion in What are the best alternatives to a double-blind RCT if blinding is impossible: example you cannot have a double-blind RCT to test the effectiveness of masks against covid. What is the best way to test if masks, as worn in real life, are effective? by DenebianSlimeMolds
Thank you, and with my layman's understanding of the issues, I agree (fwiw). I have to note how sad it seems that your answer requires a bit more honesty than I see around reddit and elsewhere...
Very frustrating how everything gets so polarized these days and often everyone is wrong in large part because they don't have enough humility to recognize what you wrote in your very first paragraph: "understanding that the answers have some amount of uncertainty is the mark of good scientists. "