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Former_Maybe_8437 t1_jeblp81 wrote

I may be fully ignorant of well known facts here, but I really want to ask.

We’ve been hearing nonstop about face masks’ impact on interpersonal interactions via hiding expressions, and the supposed harm therein. Most of it has been relating to children and learning in school settings, but it has branched out to include the population at large.

Is there a genuine concern or anything resembling a consensus in respectable scientific circles that this is a serious potential harm of facial PPE that could outweigh their utility, and that this should give us pause about the decision to have utilized it so broadly during the Covid pandemic?

I get that it’s a theoretical harm, and maybe there’s now some evidence that bears it out. But quantitatively how much of a harm is it? When we talk about rise in mental illness, learning deficits in children, personal isolation, I can think of about a billion other confounding variables that could have contributed to these other than “we lost our sense of connection to strangers in public because we periodically were unable to see their facial expressions.”

I feel like there was a strong demand for something to put under the “harms” column with masks, given that they were and are widely seen as basically a zero risk intervention.

When I’m seeing stuff about how periodic inability to see facial expressions is causing widespread harm, it feels like it’s coming mostly from one particular crowd, and has a strong “post hoc” flavor to it.

But I could be dead ass wrong here.

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QuietGanache t1_jec08li wrote

As part of my job, I do risk analysis and mitigation. I agree that it's not terribly useful to stack up the potential harms, hand wave and say that the advice to wear masks was wrong at the time (indeed, the paper reiterates this multiple times). However, going forwards, it's useful to have data that explores exactly what is being impacted and, where possible, to quantify the extent to which it's being impacted.

As they state in the discussion, this doesn't just have to be making a decision between masks and no masks; strategies could be adopted (particularly when caring for the mentally vulnerable) to reduce the impact. Not that I'm attributing this to you but it's disappointing generally when people skim a headline and laugh at the temerity of a researcher to explore something that, on the surface, is common sense.

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