That horse left long ago
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WELL, AT LEAST FOR THE ONES STILL CAPABLE OF RATIONAL THOUGHT: A Simple Cure for Maskaholics. Over and over, journalists and public officials have made fools of them proclaiming the success of mask mandates in some state or nation — whereupon Covid would promptly surge to unprecedented levels among the masked population. Some of these maskaholics will never learn, but they should at least be required to look at a graph prepared for City Journal by Ian Miller. It compares the trajectory of Covid throughout the pandemic in states with mask mandates versus the states without mandates — and shows that the masks made no difference. He also compares Germany, where almost everyone wore high-quality masks, with Sweden, where few citizens bothered to wear anything on their faces. Again, no difference in the Covid toll.
If you know still suffering from maskaholism, do them a favor and show them the graphs.
The pandemic has eased, but not the compulsion of many Americans to cover their faces. Fully vaccinated adults are still wearing masks on their solitary walks outdoors, and officials have been enforcing mask mandates on airline passengers and on some city-dwellers and students. (Though today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa, declaring the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation unlawful, comes as welcome news.) [UPDATE: Biden’s handlers bowed to the politics, and ditched the mandate this evening - Ed] Maskaholics in the press are calling for permanent masking on trains, planes, and buses. High school students in Seattle staged a protest demanding that a mask mandate be reinstated, and psychologists now deal with the anxieties of children who don’t want their classmates to see their faces. They’re suffering from “mask dependency,” as this psychological affliction is termed in Japan, where a long tradition of mask-wearing during flu season has left some individuals afraid at any time to expose their faces in public.
It’s a difficult addiction to overcome, according to the Japanese therapists who specialize in treating it—but a simple remedy might help some maskaholics. It’s a graph that should be required viewing for everyone still wearing a mask and every public official or journalist who still insists that mask mandates “control the spread.”
In their pre-Covid planning strategies for a pandemic, neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the World Health Organization had recommended masking the public—for good reason. Randomized clinical trials involving flu viruses had shown, contrary to popular wisdom in Japan and other Asian countries, that there was “no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission,” as the WHO summarized the scientific literature. The pandemic planners at the United Kingdom’s Department of Health had reached a similar conclusion: “In line with the scientific evidence, the Government will not stockpile facemasks for general use in the community.” Anthony Fauci acknowledged this evidence early in the pandemic, both in his public comments (“There’s no reason to be walking around with masks,” he told 60 Minutes) and in his private emails (“I do not recommend you wear a mask,” he told a colleague, explaining that masks were too porous to block the small Covid virus).
But then Fauci, like the CDC and the WHO, bowed to political expediency and media hysteria. Mandating masks gave the illusion of doing something against the virus. When the initial spring wave in 2020 subsided, public officials and journalists claimed that the mandates had worked, and they kept up the pretense even when Covid surged again later that year despite the continuing mandates. The resurgence was blamed on people disobeying the mandates, never mind the surveys showing widespread compliance.
This pattern of magical thinking persisted throughout the pandemic, as Miller demonstrates in dozens of graphs contrasting conventional wisdom with cruel reality. Again and again, journalists and public-health officials would single out a state or a nation that had supposedly tamed Covid by forcing citizens to wear masks—and then these masks would promptly fail to prevent an unprecedented wave of infections. In the summer of 2020, Politico praised Rhode Island’s “wear-your-damn mask” policy in an article headlined, “How the Smallest State Engineered a Covid Comeback.” A survey in the autumn found that 96 percent of Rhode Islanders were wearing masks, the highest rate in the U.S., yet that winter the state went on to suffer one of the nation’s worst Covid surges. So did New Mexico, whose surge began shortly after Scientific American praised the state’s strict mask policies in an article headlined, “How New Mexico Controlled the Spread of Covid-19.”
Meantime, the media’s favorite experts kept predicting doom for states that never mandated masks, like Florida, or that ended the mandates early in 2021, like Iowa, whose policy shift was denounced as “reckless and delusional” in a Washington Post article headlined, “Welcome to Iowa, a state that doesn’t care if you live or die.” Iowa’s Covid death toll plummeted right after the article appeared. Over the course of the pandemic, both Iowa and Florida have done better than the national average in measures of Covid mortality as well as overall excess mortality (the number of deaths more than normal from all causes).
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Germany’s stringent policies have made it a consistent media darling. CNBC called the nation’s early Covid response “a master class in science communication,” and last fall it was praised for tightening its mask mandate in an Atlantic article, “Four Measures That Are Helping Germany Beat Covid.” Its stricter mandate early last year banished cloth masks, requiring surgical masks instead, and the states of Berlin and Bavaria went still further, requiring masks of N95 quality. But as Miller shows in his book, the policies made no discernible difference. The surgical masks didn’t stop a subsequent surge throughout the country, and infection rates in Bavaria and Berlin were the same as in German states without the N95 requirement.If you’re still not convinced to take off the mask, consider one more graph from Miller. It compares Germany with Sweden, the media’s Covid villain for refusing to lock down or mandate masks. Sweden’s initial Covid surge was blamed on those lax policies, but Sweden stuck to them and actually discouraged masks in most situations. As indicated on the graph, surveys during the pandemic showed that fewer than 10 percent of Swedes bothered to wear masks. In Germany, by contrast, more than 80 percent did so, but look at the similar trajectories of the daily Covid death toll in both countries from the summer of 2020 through March of this year.
