The unmasking
Masks are a touchy subject, and when I elect to post about the statistical evidence about the efficacy of any COVID strategy, I hesitate to tread on the sore spots felt by people who've lost friends to COVID. I'm thinking especially of AVI here. Nevertheless, I'm linking to this Powerline article because, if the chart is valid at all, it strikes me as powerful evidence that mask mandates were a hugely misguided strategy. Naturally anyone who wants to mask should do so, but we did unnecessary damage to our culture and our country by imposing masks on the unconvinced.
It would have been nice if mask mandates had worked to lessen the toll of an ugly disease, but wishing don't make it so. It may even be the case that masks might have worked if the public had implemented them more effectively, but even if that was possible, mandates clearly weren't the tool to make it happen. Genuinely convincing people of the efficacy of masks might conceivably have made the public employ them in a way that might have worked, though we'll never know now. In any case, imposing the mandates on the unwilling made the job of convincing people otherwise at least less probable, if not downright impossible. We squandered credibility that we may regret having lost in some future crisis. We also set some horrible political precedents that I believe the most ardent mask proponents will live to regret.
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My contention all along is that they are no big deal, mandate or not, and of only mild efficacy, especially when not done right. I do believe that better masking rather than the cosmetic masking would have been preferable, as that is why medical facilities have always required them in some circumstances - I had situations in which I was required to mask many times while working at the hospital, though it was not always.
Medical establishments, even with state mandates off, are still requiring masks. I don't get why conservatives think that these people who make their daily bread evaluating these things have somehow all managed to be wrong. Our PCPs, our ER personnel, our ICU workers, our infection control specialists at the country's hospitals have all have somehow managed to be wrong.
I thought, and still think, that conservatives choosing this hill to die on was simply ridiculous. Persuasion was tried early on, and people were rebellious about it from the start, offering terrible reasons. I was still working at the hospital and dealing with visitors and patients then (and sometimes staff, especially the nonmedical ones). I went to the grocery and stood in line with people who loudly and proudly declared they thought masks were useless and refused to wear them. I know some of them. They have never been the persuadable sorts.* I did not think that mandates would help much at that point, and am not surprised they didn't. The claim has been "Well, if you hadn't been such prigs about making us do this, maybe we would have gone along better." I think that is a claim that has no evidence to support it. Conservatives were angry about closings and distancing and lack of travel and decided to pick some symbolic place to object. That preceded the mask mandates, which came in only gradually at a governmental level.
As to the graph, the categories mandate-no mandate are an oversimplification of the state-by-state variance. I have not looked deeper and maybe the study is fine, but I learned not to trust Powerline during this, as they have only published advocacy statistics without the slightest acknowledgement of anything contrary. I used to love them and loved commenting there.
If masks did absolutely nothing but make some nervous fellow-citizens feel less worried, that would still be a good thing.
*My son nearly married into one of those crews. Glad he dodged that bullet.
It's never less than a big deal to push people around on scant evidence with an excess of arrogance. It has long-term consequences. It makes authorities a laughing stock--sometimes a salutary effect, but often dangerous.
The authorities jammed themselves into a corner, and now are even less authoritative in view of their blank refusal to face the data. When the mandatory policy revealed itself as useless and ignorant, and they doubled down on it, they invited contempt. Who will ever believe them again? There will come a time when they will wish people would take their word in an emergency. Who would now? They won't get widespread compliance again except by brute force, which is impractical to apply broadly.
I don't get why conservatives think that these people who make their daily bread evaluating these things have somehow all managed to be wrong.
Another option, which became more plausible after some of these professionals claimed racism was also a health epidemic and endorsed the (unmasked, un-distanced) BLM protests, is that theirs was & is a politicized decision.
I learned not to trust Powerline during this, as they have only published advocacy statistics without the slightest acknowledgement of anything contrary.
I always wonder about this sort of thing. Once things get politicized, it's difficult for me to really know what set of stats to believe, mostly because I just don't have the time to track down all the data and do my own analysis.
As for what I do, when someone visits my property, I expect them to follow my rules. So, when I visit someone else's property, I follow theirs.
I mean the big problem with this graph seems to be a correlation/causation issue that I can't see they corrected for anywhere. The original city journal article said they considered "masked" states any state that had a mandate that week. But in my (deep blue) state, our mask mandate was tied directly to the number of cases we had. When they went above a certain threshold, our mask mandate went in to effect. When it dropped below that threshold it stopped. I have no idea how many other states worked this way, but I suspect it was at least a few. Regardless, the potentially causal nature of the case/mask mandate relationship makes it impossible to assess efficacy. Using the same comparison method, you could conclude that antibiotics don't work, because those who take them are going to be sicker than those who don't.
Particularly at this point in time I don't think mandates make sense so I'm not arguing for a side here, but bad statistical practices need to be noted where ever they appear.
King, I think that it's a reasonable concern, but I'm not sure what the better approach would be. What would you suggest? I also wasn't able to find any info about *any* state having week by week mask mandates. Were they really changing week by week, or in practice did they just set a threshold that was only occasionally reached?
No, in practice it didn't change week to week. IIRC it started up in late fall and ended just before spring. I ended up looking at a few other states and it looks like even if you didn't have strict metrics, quite a few did the "things are getting bad so let's put one in until it gets better" thing. Mississippi for example appears to have had a very similar mask mandate timeline to my state.
Given this, I'd probably take the data and find states in close geographic proximity with similar surge cycles, but took different approaches to masking. See what happens to the peak when there's a surge in both places but one implements a mask mandate in response and one doesn't. I don't know how many state pairing you could find like this, but having a few might give a better picture. I would also add a balance measure of some sort, as we know in many places testing capacity maxed out at the peak of surges. Maybe do a graph of both the case surge and excess mortality.
This will still have possible holes (especially post introduction of vaccines, when I suspect that became a confounder), but it would at least control for the "mandates got put in to place because things were bad" effect. I should note that I've spent a lot of time looking at state level data and I highly suspect that any benefit to mask mandates (or any mandates) diminishes over time. California notoriously kept up strict measures for months and saw everything fall apart during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season when it appears people just stopped listening. Marking on graphs where mandates started and ended might help people identify this effect as well.
Of course none of this addresses if these mandates are legal, which appears to be in question in some places. That part's above my pay grade.
Thanks, bs king. That's helpful.
Yes, good analysis. I wish you were doing the paid analysis.
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