> No, there's a very noticeable drop in social mobility as well in mid-July according to: https://covid19.apple.com/mobility https://covid19.apple.com/mobility

> No, there's a very noticeable drop in social mobility as well in mid-July according to: https://covid19.apple.com/mobility https://covid19.apple.com/mobility That is when stage 3 of the lockdown started and everyone had to work from home, the next big decline was when stage 4 started and more people had to work from home or not at all. This did have a larger effect as the source I posted indicated. This reduced the reproduction rate to about 1.1 and plateaued at that level, weeks later masks were introduced bringing it under 1. > Yet you are arguing that masks - in isolation - are so good that it's a no-brainer to mandate them? I'm arguing no such thing, the source I posted indicated that masks would at best slow down the spread of the virus without other measures. That doesn't mean they don't work. > Also, if you introduce a mask mandate, people will obviously change their behaviour, they won't just go on and live their lives exactly as before, but with a mask on. Therefore, mask mandates might reduce the spread not because of the masks themselves, but because they cause people to behave differently. This is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how they work, as long as they work. The only question that needs to be answered is "do masks reduce the spread of this virus?" Directly or indirectly doesn't matter. Factors like this are a great indication of why real world data trumps controlled studies though, you wouldn't see these effects in controlled studies. Unfortunately I'll have to leave the conversation here because the anti-masker and anti-data crowd on HN have down voted enough to rate limit me.