4 ms·

Not as clear as you make it sound: Swedes did change their behaviour/travel patterns in response to Covid-19, the Japanese instituted mask etiquette a century a

• thu2111 6y ago
  No, it's pretty clear. Relatively minor changes in behaviour (Swedes were famously out chatting in cafes and shopping at a time when many other places were under universal curfews and business closures) cannot explain the huge deviation from what the models predicted, at least not without making the models entirely unfalsifiable. Meanwhile masks are useless. Look at the graphs of almost any country that has a mask mandate and when that mandate was introduced - no inflection point is visible. Nowhere! If masks worked, at least some places would show a clear change in growth rate $incubation_period days after the mask mandate was enforced, but it never happens. As for "nobody lives in South Dakota", well, tell the people who live there that. And don't forget Belarus. The usual excuse for that is "you can't trust anything out of Belarus", although of course many people live there and no overflowing hospitals were reported by any foreigners there either. There's a very clear and visible pattern here, which is a really deep desire to believe that epidemiology as a field knows what it's doing, that the models work, that lockdowns weren't useless. But the data is as clear as day. No correlation between lockdowns and health outcomes. No lockdowns yet no ICU exhaustion in Sweden despite Sweden having one of the lowest ICU capacities in Europe - the exact opposite of what we were told to expect. Mask mandates have no visible impact on the spread of 'infection' (PCR positives, not quite the same thing).