Mask mandates are not effective.
States with mask mandates and states without have virtually the same results in terms of instances of Covid.
The Failed Covid Policy of Mask Mandates | City Journal (city-journal.org)
Yeah, it’s more a matter that many in the general public will assume that it means no mandate ever anywhere for anything, and that’s not exactly what was ruled.
OTOH the administration has stated it may yet appeal, which ISTM at this point is probably more for the sake of wanting that part made clearer.
That article from the conservative Manhattan Institute is garbage for several reasons as it contradicts actual research on this subject. First, it claims that 39 states had mask mandates and shows a daily case timeline throughout the pandemic. That is false. Several states removed mask mandates as early as Summer/Fall 2020. Also, monitoring official cases is useless when the same people who won’t wear a mask also won’t get tested unless they end up in the hospital. Hospitalizations (especially ICU) and deaths are a much better indicator and there’s more than one study that shows that Trump-voting counties do much worse. Finally, how the hell can anyone tease out the effectiveness of mask mandates with the many interventions in the background.
So can we please not spread misinformation in the quarantine zone?
This is true, it isn’t likely to be possible to make a claim for specific mask mandate effectiveness or even mask effectiveness in general due to the myriad confounding factors at play. People still do though.
There are studies that have been able to tease out the data for mask compliance and mandates pre-vaccine. They were pretty complex papers. I always found the most convincing papers to be case studies especially those on airplanes. But once we got vaccines and started accumulating infection immunity, forget it.
Lab studies are convincing enough to show that certain masks work for source control and others for both source control and PPE. That’s it.
If you have different factual information, do go ahead and post it.
Several months ago i looked into it, and found some dense, mathematical papers showing that if masks reduce the viral particles exhaled by x%, ventilation was in the range y, and it took 10 viral particles for a 50% chance of being infected (then a good number, although it’s fewer with omicron) that even crappy cloth masks enormously reduced the risk that kids would catch covid during the school day. (With omicron, the same math would require a decent-quality mask to produce the same result.)
We also have quite a lot of epidemiological data showing that nations with a custom of masking have fared much better than those full of citizens who object to masks.
We also had studies out of the US showing things like “hospitals in Boston that require masks have lower rates of covid among their staff than the background rate of covid in the community”, despite those staff being exposed to a lot more infectious people than the average citizen.
So, if mask mandates don’t work it’s because people refuse to wear masks even when that’s violating the mandate, not because masking doesn’t work.
Now, it’s probably true that mask mandates in the US haven’t been terribly effective. Perhaps better messaging would have helped. Perhaps everyone saw the stupidity of opening the bars and closing the schools, and just decided that all the rules were stupid. I dunno. But the problems with mask mandates have to do with when they are imposed and how much the population buys into them, not with masks.
Devil’s advocate: does this mean that wearing masks in the post-mandate era is a waste of time and effort?
I believe masks still provide some protection for the wearer and more protection for those around the wearer. For example (gift link):
I’m happy to believe that masks mandates were less necessary in relatively sparse states, without lots of public transportation and high rises, and more effective in densely packed cities with elevators and public transportation. Any study that isn’t trying to control for population density is a waste.
Uh, you just read evidence that masks work, and concluded that they don’t? No, “mask mandates” don’t work very well when measured at the state level due to the complexity of measuring and due to people ignoring them. Masks only protect you when you, or the other people near you, wear them. Mandating their use doesn’t magically make them work unless people actually wear them.
But yeah, masks work.
Let’s neutrally explore that. It makes sense as a layperson. So why in the last 100 years have we not said that during the winter months or flu season that we should wear masks? I don’t have a cite, but I recall reading that this was studied by the people who know shit (PWKS) and they concluded that masks would not stop the transmission of these various viruses.
So we all collectively decided not to wear masks. Why is covid “different”? I mean, it is different in that it has killed 1 million Americans, but how do the principles of virus transmission change because of it? From the prior conclusions, I don’t see how masks work. Viruses are microscopic and can pass through any breathable material.
The “sneezing on my face” examples are fanciful as I have never had that in my 46 years on the earth, but I’m supposed to believe that this guy wearing a mask in the convenience store isn’t passing on pathogens in his body? I can smell the 9 beers he drank for breakfast. Any virus in his body is not being passed on? I am really Just Asking Questions because that seems to a lay person to be against the science, against all prior science, and against common sense.
To follow up, I get the common sense conclusion that as that guy is breathing, talking or sneezing, I get more of whatever he is transmitting right into my face (all and the prior post assuming no masks). But I’m sure that the PWKS considered that in the prior studies. Did they miss something? Were they just wrong? They had a 100 years to study it.
Masks and other COVID measures do work for the flu. We know this because the flu almost went away for the first couple of years of COVID.
Flu is usually much more mild than COVID, as you point out with the number of people killed by COVID, vs. the flu in a normal year.
You answered your own question – COVID is different because it is much, much more transmissible and kills many more people.
Flu has been mild enough that no one bothered to wear masks (except in some East Asian countries, of course). If it were 10x as deadly and 10x as transmissible, people would probably have worn masks (well, until it got politicized for whatever bullshit reason, of course).
If you’re looking to get sneezed on, try riding the subway in NYC at rush hour.
Again, I am not a PWKS, but that was not the previous answer. We weren’t told not to wear masks during flu season because the disease was relatively minor. We were told that a cloth mask, one which air passes through, will not stop a virus.
Missed the edit window. Even if what you say about the flu is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, being less transmissible does not mean non-transmissible. If masks work for Covid then there should have been a finding that they work for flu transmission and we should have been told something in 2008 such as “Hey, if you want to wear a mask during flu season, it might help you a touch, but if you don’t wear one, then no big deal.”
That wasn’t what we were told. We were told that they were near worthless. And apart from the “it would have been far worse” arguments (obviously) without support, the mask mandates did not stem the flow of any of the surges.
Yes, and that guidance changed. I mention above that early guidance changed as more and more was learned, and, since I wasn’t looking for a reason not to wear a mask, I rolled with it.
ETA: Saw your second post. I’m not really motivated to go through all the same arguments that have been rehashed here a million times, so I’ll bow out. If you read the various threads here in the QZ, you can find your answers.
But we now have real world experience to look upon. If masks worked, then we should be able to look at a state, let’s pick Florida or South Dakota, and pin point outsized incidents of Covid being out of control there, right? If you are right, shouldn’t Florida have had an outsized number of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations, controlling for the elderly population?
From the data I have seen, there is no disparity between places where masks were common or mandated versus those where it was not mandated or ignored. The numbers are pretty much the same which would suggest that masks didn’t do diddly.
I’m really not rehashing this with you. Mask compliance just about everywhere in the US was a joke, because some people decided that not masking was some way to demonstrate Freedom! and a whole political party was backing them. I hope that’s not too political for this forum. So, I’ll just point you to my post with the gift article above and step away.
I am really pissed about the end of the mask mandate on public transportation, especially the kind that millions of people have no real choice about using on a daily basis. During the couple of weeks when I tried my hand at commuting downtown again last summer, before Delta and the refusal of my employer to do, well, anything at all useful about enforcing the indoor mask mandate, compliance on public transportation was pretty decent, but never 100%. (I biked to work, weather permitting, but this is Chicago so weather doesn’t always permit.)
My asthmatic self gets bronchitis or even pneumonia at the drop of a hat when I get any kind of upper respiratory infection, even the common cold, so I sure as hell don’t want COVID - and even if it spared my lungs, the possibility of hospitalization or long COVID are no joke. And my employer, with some convincing from my doctor, agreed, and gave me an ADA accommodation for 100% remote work - for now, anyway.
I am, of course, fully vaxxed and now double-boosted. I am fortunate enough to have a choice about whether to do things like grocery shop in person, and I have a job that can be done remotely, but not everyone does. Asthma isn’t exactly an unusual medical issue.
I can’t fathom why it’s such a big burden to have to wear a mask for, say, 45 minutes when you are packed in like sardines at rush hour. And yes, I do think it’s selfish to basically tell people with conditions that place them at higher risk that they should just deal with being unable to participate in public life safely. Around here, we are still in an area of very high transmission; cases are up 77% over 14 days ago, and hospitalizations, a lagging indicator, are starting to head up, too. The vast majority of adults around here are vaccinated, but especially with the possibility of reinfection, we sure as hell aren’t out of the woods yet.
Yeah, the burden of wearing a mask on public transit is really minimal. People mostly ignore each other on public transit anyway. There is approximately zero social cost.