# Coronavirus general discussion and chit-chat **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [August 12, 2020, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-general-discussion-and-chit-chat/917903 "2020-08-12T17:29:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 669
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2021, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-general-discussion-and-chit-chat/917903/669 "2021-09-06T02:38:30Z")
> [@DMC](#): > > What definition of “huge amount of good” are you using and where are you reading this? > [@Tfletch1](#): > > This isn’t true though. Aha, found what gave me the impression (or at least the kind of thing that did): a quote from the study linked below: > [@Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Thread - 2021 Breaking News](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-covid-19-2019-ncov-thread-2021-breaking-news/929428/2417): > > Something simple and cheap that doesn’t require being poked with a needle. And it works! … This week, a group of scientists from Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other institutions published the final results of a randomized study of community-wide masking behavior in Bangladesh. The study encompassed roughly 350,000 people in 600 villages. The researchers randomly selected certain villages for an intervention that included giving out free masks, paying villagers to remind people to cover t… “We cannot reject that [cloth masks] have zero or only a small impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.” I don’t see how that impression could’ve resulted if cloth masks had any sort of appreciable impact. And given that paper masks, which plenty of people wear, must surely be worse than cloth masks, never mind gaiters and such, how is my original statement not at least possible? Shouldn’t we at least consider making surgical masks to be the bare minimum to have an impact on this hugely raging pandemic? --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/coronavirus-general-discussion-and-chit-chat/917903)._