Some substantial continental countries who have done well [all in cases per million - for reference US is 96,406 cases per million, approaching 1 in 10 of pop., and probably already much more]:
Mongolia [5000 per million]
Vietnam [28 per million]
Rwanda [1783 per million]
Ururguay was going spectacularly well until Xmas, , esp. considering it was next to Brazil, but is now getting its first major rise.
I suspect its a combination of properly applied and followed physical restrictions, a good public health system [not hospitals but community health infrastructure and staff], a leadership that believes in science, and a sense of collective welfare being at least as important as individual sovereignity.
I get my numbers from Worldometer, but when you get down to that bottom end of the cases per million list you do run into countries where there are clear reporting failures, cover-ups and no capacity to get reliable health stats as well. I wouldn’t trust
An update to this post: A recent study found that mask wearing was effective, but mask mandates weren’t.
On page 4 they have a set of graphs labeled the ‘mandate - wearing correlation’. What the graphs show is that mandates don’t typically change behaviour much. In most places, the population was already masking when the mandate was imposed, so it had little effect.
There are a few exceptions, but this explains some of the weirder results where ending mandates didn’t make things worse, or adding them didn’t make things better. The people are doing what they will do, and not paying much attention to mandates. Rather, mask wearing in populations seems to be more of an emergent phenomenon.
I suspect that there’s also some correlation with other risk factors. States that are more open and also probably less likely to wear masks or get vaccinated, though that might not be true in all cases.
There are numerous other factors that can impact whether a mandate succeeds or doesn’t. If we know that masks are effective, there’s no reason not to require that they be worn in public. Whether people comply, whether authorities enforce the orders, whether people take unnecessary risks while wearing masks under the mistaken assumption that the mask will provide certain protection…those are factors that the mandate itself cannot account for.
The uptick in masking was typically in the days leading up to the mandate, so while the date of the mandate might have had little effect, whatever drove the mandate might well have been causal.
Either knowledge of upcoming mandates, the cause of the upcoming mandates (news of a super spreader event, hospital capacity issues, etc.), or something else along those lines absolutely did show a correlation with mask wearing. The charts are a bit small, but I didn’t see a single one that had a higher starting point than ending point, so something related to the mandate caused an uptick.
So, making an announcement today that a mandate is coming on July 22nd might not correlate with increased mask usage beginning on that date, but on July 23rd, mask usage will be the same or higher than it is today, according to those charts.
Unless I am misreading, the only way they determined “mask wearing” was solely by self reporting, correct? Of course, that isn’t the best way to do things, but you have some odd ball results in there such as mask wearing going down in Greece after the mandate, remaining exactly the same in New Mexico and Massachusetts, and going up in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps local pressures influenced self reporting results.
I’m not discounting the study, but I wanted to point that out, and also point out that it doesn’t comport with my own personal observations (which are meaningless) that when the mandates went into place, many many more people started wearing them.
Very true. In addition to that, figure 2 in that paper shows that a mask mandate has no effect in places where most people are already wearing a mask. Trying to look at covid-19 cases before and after mask mandates won’t give you a correlation if people are already wearing masks or if the mandates are not enforced.
Anyway, the objective of the study was not to determine whether mask mandates work (one wonders why he’s trying to make that claim). Instead the purpose was to determine whether wearing masks in public reduces the spread of covid-19. To do that, they had to figure out the best way to measure how many people were wearing masks.
Self-reporting is not ideal, but they were able to determine a positive correlation between mask wearing and a reduction in covid-19 cases. I can’t tell how they normalized for any other non-pharmaceutical interventions. For example, people in the Netherlands didn’t wear masks. However, they had a lot of restrictions imposed. In fact, they recently lifted them only to have them re-imposed due to the Delta variant.
There’s a bunch of systematic reviews out there on non-pharmaceutical interventions and covid-19. They’re hard for me to read but the bottom line is that they are effective if implemented early enough and not lifted too early.