Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness issued a statement Tuesday critical of the decision by the Hamilton Southeastern (HSE) School Board to have all grade levels go to virtual classes beginning November 19 through at least December 4. The mayor tells me in a podcast interview recorded Wednesday, November 18, that he stands by that statement, but has one regret.
“People, I think, read more into that statement than probably was there, but I stand by it,” said the mayor in the LarryInFishers.com podcast episode. ”Obviously, right now, things are emotionally charged, people took (the statement) and ran with it. I regret that aspect of it.”
The city will provide any resources it can provide to support getting HSE students back into classrooms, according to the mayor.
Mayor Fadness talked about that, more COID-19 issues, the Interrupting Racism program, the State 37 construction project and more in this podcast interview.
There were a few audio glitches that happen sometimes in Zoom connections, so please be aware, but you should be able to hear most of the interview with no problems.
Larry and Mayor Fadness, the long-awaited Danish mask study:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
“Our results suggest that the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect, mask recommendations were not among those measures, and community use of masks was uncommon.”
And this:
https://twitter.com/Lupinator101/status/1329129131683033090
Why was this long awaited? I’ve never heard of anticipation for confirmation bias. It’s a single study and rarely does any single study invalidate the entirety of all other previous studies. It’s a randomized study, which is nice but far from conclusive. It’s currently a hyped up outlier. Science doesn’t change it’s course that abruptly you keep studying until you have something overwhelming. This certainly isn’t one that will change any serious minds en masse.
Some important details you might have overlooked:
“Limitation: Inconclusive results, missing data, variable adherence, patient-reported findings on home tests, no blinding, and no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.”
The study limitations basically say, “read no further” but, this is a privately funded study so they kinda have to deliver some sort of conclusion.
-Participants reported their own test results.
-Mask use was not independently verified, and users may not have worn them correctly.
-The study only looks at how much the mask protects the wearer not how much it protected others from infected wearers.
-The study (which does not do a post hoc power calc) still shows 20-30% effectiveness which is only slightly less than the 40-50% that is the currently held understanding for masks.
Here’s a good study – Face Masks, Public Policies and Slowing the Spread of COVID-19: Evidence from Canada September 24,2020 – http://www.sfu.ca/econ-research/RePEc/sfu/sfudps/dp20-09.pdf
This study is good too – https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818
This is older but certainly a quality study –
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7291980/
Here’s a great search to run if you are interested in current understandings –
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22masks%22+%22infections%22&filter=years.1949-2019
Did you see that Ontario’s cases recently went to zero?
Wow. Way to completely misinterpret that study there, buddy. Let me guess. You have zero knowledge of science. That study wasn’t to test if masks worked in general. It was to test if a mask would protect you if no one around you was wearing them. And it showed that masks don’t appear to protect the wearer, which is what scientists have been saying since the beginning. Studies where everyone wears masks tell us that wearing masks protect others from you, so if everyone wears them, everyone is protected. Nice try though. You get an F for effort.
Larry – Thank you for conducting this podcast. This past week has been difficult to say the least. I have been a supporter of Mayor Fadness and what he has done for this City over the past 6 years of residing here. However, there are a couple of comments he made in this podcast that concern me. First, he mentions that people are reading more into his statement than is there. I would beg to differ as I’m not sure it could be clearer that he is completely out of touch with what has been going on in the schools for the past few months. He made two very conflicting statements (“I didn’t know” and “I’m doing everything I can”). “Doing everything you can” requires knowledge of what is happening. For anyone paying attention, the writing was on the wall about where the schools were headed weeks ago.
He mentioned at one point in your interview two examples of the comments made on this statement, and the facts seemed really misrepresented. Yes, he read two conflicting comments…but the reality is there were nearly 670 comments on the Fishers Government Facebook site (one place the statement resides). Of these, the vast majority were in utter dismay of the lack of conscientiousness the Mayor showed in that statement towards the difficult decisions that are being made in the community. This type of response is out of the ordinary for this community. In a quick perusal, most items that this site posts generate <10 comments. I searched to find a post that even came close to the public outcry that this one resulted in. The closest I found was on March 16th, which had 126 comments, in a post regarding travel restrictions due to COVID. I would argue there were a lot of unknowns at that point in time. Even so, those comments were much closer to a mixture of opinions instead of completely lopsided in one way or another.
Lastly, he discussed pulling down the post that was originally on his political page because it was headed in a negative direction and did not want to cause further consternation. We are in a bad place with the virus both currently and as we look to the weeks/months ahead. COVID-19 is spreading exponentially through this community. Our hospitals are on diversion. This is my biggest issue with our leadership right now…WE SHOULD BE CONCERNED.
For these reasons, Mayor Fadness owes this community an apology. No one is happy with any of the repercussions of this virus. We need leadership, true leadership, to begin to heal both physically and mentally. As the Mayor of this City, that starts with him. Fail fast, apologize when you are wrong, and trailblaze forward.