But that was never the point: obedience to authority and virtue signaling was
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Do mask mandates work? Bay Area COVID data from June says no.
The ineffectiveness of masks, especially cloth bandannas and those cute blue “surgical”, face coverings, was known and admitted by the so-called health authorities like the CDC from the beginning of the panicdemic, but the entire country was forced to perform face theater for over a year, and the mandate is still in force in many liberal enclaves like churches and vegan restaurants. This failure was duly reported in the conservative press, but mainstream media ignored it, and liberals didn’t care anyway: “I wear a mask to show that I’m not a Republican”, was a proud announcement shouted on many Twitter and Facebook pages.
This article will have no effect when the Democrats street the next pre-election pandemic in October, but at lest it appears in a liberal publication, which will make it harder for the makers to dismiss it as MAGA propaganda.
In early June, during an uptick in COVID-19 cases, Alameda County was the only Bay Area county to bring back an indoor mask mandate.
At the time, county Health Officer Dr. Nicholas Moss said, “Putting our masks back on gives us the best opportunity to limit the impact of a prolonged wave on our communities.”
But regional case data provides no discernible evidence that the rule, which was lifted June 25, succeeded at that goal.
The graphs below compare Alameda County’s seven-day average case rate from the past two months to rates in neighboring Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties. Contra Costa and Santa Clara, in particular, are natural comparisons to Alameda, because they have similar vaccination rates and demographic data. San Francisco, on the other side of the bay, provides an additional point of reference. All data comes from the California Department of Public Health.
The case rate curves for Alameda and Contra Costa counties are near-identical. Because the neighboring counties are similar in so many respects, if masking policy had an impact on pandemic outcomes, one would expect to see some sort of discrepancy in the graph.
