US STUDY: IF ONLY 80% OF AMERICANS WORE MASKS, INFECTIONS WOULD DROP

A new study spearheaded by a US computer scientist, a physician from London, a bioinformatician from Cambridge, an economist from Paris, and a sociologist and population-dynamics expert from Finland has finally buried the arguments of anti-mask advocates that a mask is an affront on their liberty and their right to free speech.

De Kai, the US-born son of Chinese immigrants, said in a report featured on the May 8, 2020 issue of Vanity Fair, noted that the assertion of anti-mask advocates that masks offer no defense against the disease has been demolished by the simple fact that mask-wearing countries have lower infection and death rates, noting that as of May 8, Japan only had 577 deaths while the US had 76,032, much higher than all US deaths in the Vietnam War.

De Kai and his team crafted a computer forecasting model they call the  “masksim” simulator that allowed them to create scenarios of populations that wear masks, like those in Japan, and those that generally don’t, and to compare what happens to infection rates over time. Masksim used programming employed by epidemiologists to track outbreaks and pathogens like COVID-19, Ebola, and SARS, and blended this with other models used in artificial intelligence to take into account the role of chance, in this case the randomness and unpredictability, of human behavior. The team also added some original programming that takes into account mask-specific criteria, such as how effective certain masks are at blocking the invisible micro-droplets of moisture from mouths and noses.

The team is also releasing a study that describes their model in detail as well as their contention that masksim’s forecasts support pro-mask advocates.

“What’s most important about wearing masks right now,” said Guy-Philippe Goldstein, an economist, cybersecurity expert, and lecturer at the Ecole de Guerre Economique in Paris—and a masksim collaborator, “is that it works, along with social distancing, to flatten the curve of infections as we wait for treatments and vaccines to be developed—while also allowing people to go out and some businesses to reopen.” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, said what De Kai has is “a very thorough model and well done.” Jeremy Howard, founding researcher at fast.ai and a distinguished research scientist at the University of San Francisco, also assessed the paper and said: “It’s almost overkill how careful they were with this modeling.” #coronavirusimpact #COVID19