>To actually tease out the effects of mask use from jurisdictional case statistics, you’d also have to (1) have stats on mask use, which (despite people making

>To actually tease out the effects of mask use from jurisdictional case statistics, you’d also have to (1) have stats on mask use, which (despite people making claims about it in coordination with blatantly false claims about cases), I haven’t seen, and (2) have good stats for the other things that would reasonably be expected to contribute to differences in infection spread, (3) either have enough a priori knowledge of the contribution of the items in 2 to control for their effect in 1:1 comparisons, or have data from enough different places to do an analysis that determines the contributions of different factors. Absolutely, 100% with you. And effectiveness of a mitigation should be determined before mandating it, and the positives and negatives of the mitigation should be well understood. > I didn’t offer any conclusion except that the upthread claim that California had a much higher rate of COVID cases than FL/TX was bunk. I was responding to the parents claim that masks “ drastically reduce the spread” which I think I’ve showed is an unsupported claim, although I stated my initial claim too strongly. There is no significant observable effect on state covid case count or state death to confirmed case count (which would to some degree control for some differences in testing). > Even with good mask stats, a head to head comparison of a couple states case numbers with mask stats wouldn’t otherwise be useful for anything. After one year of mandating this mitigation we should be able to see some observable difference to continue mandating that people cover their faces. This is not zero-cost, especially for the ones living alone, as the masks block facial expressions showing emotion and the masks make it harder to breathe which can on aggregate cause health issues. For instance, a large number of dental issues is caused by mask use [1]. [1] https://fineartsdentistry.com/how-face-masks-are-affecting-oral-health-during-a-pandemic/ https://fineartsdentistry.com/how-face-masks-are-affecting-o...