Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don't Help and May Make Things Worse
NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/well/live/coronavirus-restaurants-classrooms-salons.html
Science article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh2939
Preprint article: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.26.21261146v1.full.pdf
Initially reading through the NYT article, I had a very high opinion of it. Over the course of the Covid pandemic, many different mitigation techniques have been used in order to protect the public including masking, outdoor dining, social distancing, remote work, and the use of plastic barriers. The NYT article goes through how the plastic barriers we have put up in an effort to prevent the spread of Covid-19 may be effective at blocking large droplets, but won't necessarily be as effective at blocking the spread of smaller aerosols, which can hang in the air for longer. Especially if a room lacks proper ventilation, the presence of barriers won't prevent aerosols from eventually making their way around the barrier and spreading infection. The article did a good job of comparing to more well-known things, comparing large particles to spitballs and small particles to cigarette smoke.
The NYT article cited multiple studies, but I'm only going to focus on two. The first study it cited was a Science paper from April 2021 which looked at Covid mitigation techniques in schools. This article was by Stuart et al. from Johns Hopkins and they used data from the COVID-19 Symptom Survey which is collected through Facebook in partnership with Carnegie Mellon and has about 500,000 US responses weekly. It is open access and has a plain language paragraph at the top explaining their main conclusions. The NYT article stated that "desk screens in classrooms were associated with an increased risk of coronavirus infection." This conclusion was pulled from Figure 3 in the paper which does suggest a slightly increased risk of covid-like illness when desk shields are used, however, even the paper itself states that this may not be an entirely accurate conclusion because the use of desk shields is reported along with many other measures, so claiming that the desk shields are increasing risk is not necessarily true. Most of this paper was spent focusing on if the risks of in-person schooling to the community are mitigated using current techniques, so they did not set up an experiment to determine what desk shields in isolation do, but instead took reported data from schools which have many other factors contributing to spread.
The second article I'll be talking about is the last one cited in the NYT piece. It's not yet out for publication, which the NYT article mentions, but it is available via medRxiv in preprint. This study used a cough simulator (metal bellows and a linear motor) with a 28% KCl solution to expel 4.2 L of aerosol at 11 L/s to mimic coughs from influenza patients. They measured the aerosol size and count using an optical particle counter behind the plastic barrier. The number that the NYT article cites is that the taller barriers stop "about 70%" of the particles from the simulated cough. This number isn't wrong, but it leaves out a lot of detail from the article, including that for particles under 725 um, the barriers above cough height were able to block 76 to 90% of the particles. This is at odds with what the NYT piece is trying to say, which makes me question why they chose to include two paragraphs about this paper. Both in the paper itself and in the NYT piece, it discusses the various ways this study falls short of accurately depicting real life scenarios, and with the other papers and quotes from researchers I'm not sure that including this specific study helped their case.
Overall, I think that the NYT article did a good job of conveying that the presence of plastic barriers won't necessarily protect from infection, and that there are many other factors to consider when determining what Covid mitigation techniques to use. It is especially important now as we're in this transition era between pandemic normal and post-pandemic normal that people take into account which techniques will have the greatest overall impact since many people are now using less mitigation techniques overall. I would give this article an 8/10 taking points off for the loss of nuance in the first article as well as the large focus on a not yet published study which doesn't quite support their point.
Thank you for giving your thoughts on these interesting articles. Considering the continuing threat of COVID-19 and use of plastic barriers, I found this article's subject to be very relevant and important to contemplate.
ReplyDeleteContrary to some of the other blog posts, this NYT article not only referenced multiple other studies, but also provided links to all of them. I understand not talking about all of the articles, but why were the Science and preprint articles chosen? Also, I noticed that the NYT article used a couple of the other articles to make their point, but when reading through them, I noticed that the point raised was only mentioned once within them. Do you have any ideas as to why Parker-Pope decided to add these references that only seemed to mention in passing Parker-Pope's main idea?
I enjoyed reading your summary, this is pretty interesting since there's not a ton of research out there on this topic. I agree that it's odd that the article cites a non-peer reviewed study that doesn't exactly support the claim they're trying to make. With a topic as recent as COVID barriers it makes sense that there isn't much research to support the author's claim, but I think leaving out this study would've been beneficial to their argument.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like most of the experts that the author interviewed for this article agree with the author's argument, but the research studies cited don't strongly support the views of the author. Do you think that the article would seem more credible if they didn't cite any of the research studies, and instead only focused on the word of the experts?
Hi! Great summary and review of this article, I thought you did a good job honing in on 2 of the scientific papers that the article cited. One think that caught my attention was that the first paper claimed the use of face shields to be associated with an increase in Covid-19 infection in classroom settings. Something along with other parameters being measured that could account for the increase in infection is the fact that even if they controlled for 'county-level incidences,' our evolution of testing and monitoring the spread of this disease has also rapidly progressed. So, at certain times, the testing rates could have been much lower than others due to the changes in policy, changes in availability of testing, etc. therefore skewing the association found. I think this is what makes clinical-based public health research so complicated (and beautiful) at times, because there are a lot of factors at play for many of these public health level issues. Just some thoughts! Great work!
ReplyDeleteHi Katie! I really liked that you chose a more recent paper, and one from a highly trafficked, trusted news source like the NYT. Whereas I don't normally question the science that is presented in NYT articles, this has made me realize that I need to read more critically whenever a popular news source is interpreting scientific data. I also think this is a good article to think about, since it likely has gotten way more views than a lot of more "niche" articles that focus on issues that the general public may not care as much about. The way that this article is interpreted by the public has important implications for what types of covid mitigation measures are actually implemented in public spaces going forward.
ReplyDeleteHi Katie,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your response to the paper. I was surprised to read that you gave the New York Times a rating of 8/10 when it is generally regarded as a credible source. I agree with your reasoning as to why the article lost points. Generally when the NYT releases an article, they attempt to interweave the findings of multiple science papers. Thus, the overall findings of each of the separate articles lose a bit of nuance/specificity.
Hi Katie,
ReplyDeleteNice analysis! I agree that the New York Times article did a pretty good job conveying the relevant aerosol knowledge to a general audience -- especially the analogy of spitballs vs. cigarette smoke to illustrate the ineffectiveness of most plastic barriers and face shields. I think it was scientifically inaccurate to go further and say plastic barriers may have contributed to an uptick in sickness. A generally well-trusted news source such as NYT shouldn't be mixing up correlation and causation, even if the statement was cushioned with "may". The collection of studies they cited were not in great support of their point, as you note. The takeaway of the article should have been limited to "Don't let plastic barriers give you a false sense of security."
Hey Katie,
ReplyDeleteThis was a fun read and application of aerosols, one which we can all heavily relate to right now. Although, I definitely think the NYT article was a little clickbait and do not buy their argument completely, but it brought up some good points. In my opinion, both of the articles you cited argue in favor of mitigation measures, especially the unpublished article, which discussed the certain requirements for effective shields. Although small aerosols can circulate fast, keeping the big ones out of the air is still crucial, as was evident in the unpublished article. I felt that this author cherrypicked at these publications a little bit, especially the Science one because the main finding was that precautions and mitigation measures were ultimately helpful to a certain degree. The air circulation argument for the barriers is decent, but the unpublished article showed that there is an optimal size for barriers that maximizes protection while allowing greatest airflow. Thus, I actually think an 8 is a generous score because I feel misled by the title of the article: the author should have titled it along the lines of 'recent research elucidates better strategies for effectively minimizing COVID-19 spread by air.' Do you feel that the title was misleading or over-exaggerated? How convinced are you by the article and the data? Personally, I would also take the Science article with a huge grain of salt due to response bias, I am always extremely skeptical of survey data like this and though it is important and can elucidate qualitative trends, I am skeptic to rule out anything as highly quantitative, such as the data with the shields. I think if anything, the Science article reveals that something interesting might be there to investigate with rigorous, reproducible, controlled experiments. In the case of investigating shields with the rigorous experiments in the unpublished article, I was convinced that shields can be an effective measure to mitigate COVID-19 spread, given optimal geometry and strategic placement for them.
Hi! Great picks! I really enjoyed reading about this since this topic is so prevalent in our daily lives. I totally agree with the rating that you gave. In class recently we had been talking about the clickbait aspect of these articles. How do you think the NYT did on that front? Did they play more into the clickbait side of these articles, or did they stay more true to reporting the science?
ReplyDeleteThis was a very interesting article. I am wondering why you chose to hone in on the two studies that you did, and if you took a look at the other studies that were sited. Were the claims about the other studies also misleading? I'm also wondering on your opinion of siting so many different articles without going too much in depth on any of them. Is that beneficial to the reader? Or does it bombard them with too much information that they would have to further research to get a full picture of?
ReplyDeleteThis is a very relevant topic of discussion in the wake of the age we live in these days... I'm curious to hear what your opinion is on a journal like NYT's responsibility to report accurate information like this especially involving COVID. With people's lives literally on the line, it seems very important not to spread misinformation about this topic, yet time and time again we've seen it happen with countless sources. They do seem to do a good job accurately reporting here but this seems to just be the tip of the iceberg of covid-related research and research reporting.
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