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Link: https://www.sensible-med.com/p/nejms-disappointing-decision-to-publish

thus making a study of 2/72 Districts unreliable...BUT the fact of the matter is that the Student/Staff populations in those two Districts represent close to 18% of the study’s population...making that aspect an Excellent basis for any study. You were wrong, and have yet to apologize for your error.

b) Your Opinion piece contains only suppositions of 'Confounding' factors without substantive evidence. In fact, one of the 'Confounding" factors your authors cited was addressed in the remarks of the NEJM Study...see the following from the study...Oh, and the Principal behind your "Sensible Medicine", Vinay Prasad, has not burnished his CV even within the Trump admin...having been kicked out of his post for very poor decision making.

"A key strength of this study is our use of difference in difference methods with staggered dates of the lifting of masking requirement. Although there are some factors related to SARS-CoV-2 exposure that differed across school districts, difference in differences methods yield robust analyses in the context of sources of confounding that do not change over time (e.g. sociodemographic characteristics or building conditions) or do not coincide with the policy change of interest. In sensitivity analyses, the benefits of masking requirements persisted after we controlled for COVID-19 indicators at the community level, vaccination coverage, and previous incidence of infection. Furthermore, we found that school districts that lifted masking requirements were districts that would have been expected to have lower incidences of COVID-19 (on average), which suggests that any residual confounding ; by COVID-19 risk would have led to underestimation of the harms of lifting masking requirements overall.

A limitation of this study is that we did not have data regarding COVID-19 testing in individual school districts. However, DESE ended the practice of required testing of only unmasked close contacts in January 2022, and the data from that "test-and-stay" program show that far too few schools continued with the program for it to explain our results. Under the most extreme assumptions, additional testing of unmasked close contacts could explain less than 7% of the estimated excess cases. Overall, our findings should be interpreted as the effect of universal masking policies and not as the effect of masking, per se, since masks were still encouraged in most school settings. Despite this consideration, the effect of lifting masking requirements was substantial.
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You needn't apologize for the poor choice of sources, since you were duped...but the study ratio mistake was all on you...so do the right thing and apologize for that.

She and Prasad never disputed what the study found. They point out the methodology is unreliable and there's no sure way to tell whether masking worked, despite what the NEJM might say.

You also must have missed where the school districts in North Dakota showed no difference in case rates between masked and unmasked districts (same as for entire state of South Carolina, same as for Georgia's Chatham and Effingham Counties, same as for my two kids' schools...something you obviously will continue to refuse to address because it's inconvenient to your narrative). You also must have missed where they took an incomplete study, extended it out to nine weeks instead of two and included 3x more counties, and found no difference in case rates.

I will concede, as the author does, that fewer cases of Covid occurred in the masked school districts in Massachusetts. So conversely, will you not concede other studies and data show no difference?

...just own up to it and move on...heck, even Baron has made similar oversights on the MIT and NEJM studies...

Rather than waste time getting down in the weeds over study methodologies, I suggest that you use your logic while viewing a couple of videos from physicians explaining the wisdom of wearing masks during a pandemic, like COVID-19..




Link: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/why-doctors-wear-masks