The War against Americans plods on
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Also yesterday: NYT Why mask mandates don’t work work
Ed Morrisey, Hot Air: Let’s face it, mask mandates don’t work:
“Do masks prevent transmission of COVID-19? Yes, reports the New York Times’ David Leonhardt — in the laboratory. In the real world, no data definitively establishes effectiveness of masking, and especially of mask mandates. The difference matters, Leonhardt warns, because upticks in transmission and hospitalization will likely have policymakers reverting back to mask mandates even though there is no data that shows an impact on either:”
Masks reduce the spread of the Covid virus by preventing virus particles from traveling from one person’s nose or mouth into the air and infecting another person. Laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated the effect.
Given this, you would think that communities where mask-wearing has been more common would have had many fewer Covid infections. But that hasn’t been the case.
In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.
Advocates of mandates sometimes argue that they do have a big effect even if it is not evident in population-wide data, because of how many other factors are at play. But this argument seems unpersuasive.
“Not only is the argument unpersuasive, it argues against clearly demonstrated effects from other strategies. Most notably, vaccination rates have a clear and consistent impact on deaths and severely acute cases, a trend which started obviously when vaccines became widely available. But even after the majority of the population had been vaccinated — and more exposed — mask mandates didn’t show any significant impact:”
After all, the effect of vaccines on severe illness is blazingly obvious in the geographic data: Places with higher vaccination rates have suffered many fewer Covid deaths. The patterns are clear even though the world is a messy place, with many factors other than vaccines influencing Covid death rates.
Yet when you look at the data on mask-wearing — both before vaccines were available and after, as well as both in the U.S. and abroad — you struggle to see any patterns.
“Even the idea that hospitalizations are ticking up is somewhat suspect. The CDC still does not distinguish between COVID-correlated admissions and deaths and COVID-caused admissions and deaths. Four months ago, the CDC belatedly announced an effort to refine reporting systems to distinguish between the two, but they still lump both together. That’s an even bigger problem than two years ago, thanks to variants which are much less likely to produce seriously acute COVID-19 cases.”
All of this has been known since the first data started becoming available: This October, 2020, article, in The Federalist for instance, asserted that fact, and gave links to studies using actual facts (!)
. And the uselessness of mandating masks for school children to keep them from contracting or spreading the disease has always been known from the beginning of the panic (which is why European countries recommended against them) but the CDC teamed up with the teachers unions to terrorize parents and school boards, despite numerous warnings from psychologists, doctors, and even the WHO of the damage being done.
Etcetera. Yet the federal government fights on, for no other reason that I can see except to keep its foot on citizens’ throats and maintain its grip. Many have said, and it’s been said here since the first lockdown began in March, 2020, that this entire exercise has been about power and control, that it was a proof of concept exercise to see how far governments could go, how much freedom citizens would relinquish if sufficiently panicked; my opinion hasn’t changed.
RELATED UPDATE, from Instapundit:
TO BE FAIR, CALIFORNIA NEEDS A RECESSION: Joel Kotkin: California needs a recession: Its progressive rulers deserve a rude awakening.
[Glenn Reynolds] There’s nothing to suggest that progressive rulers mind when their jurisdiction slip into poverty. In fact, they seem to see it as an opportunity to further consolidate their power.
