Robin Monotti + Cory Morningstar

Forwarded from Mike Yeadon

down, holding it up, (then declaring that it provides *more* protection
than a vaccine would!?!), all during a nationally televised hearing in
front of a senate committee). (There are other mechanisms associated with
facemask usage that would plausibly lead to increased transmission, but
that requires its own article.)

This disposition against the public at large using facemasks as a method of
both individual protection and as source control was emphatically supported
by the medical and academic community for a few weeks as Covid started to
become a public crisis. If you look at the statements of the various public
figures who inveighed against the public usage of facemasks, you will see
that they generally went far beyond a simple “don’t do it, it’s not that
effective and we need to conserve PPE for healthcare workers” – they were
resoundingly along the lines of “what a stupid idea”, which reflected the
innate, reflexive dismissal grounded in the decades of conventional medical
wisdom on the subject.

Fortunately, though, we do not have to rely on untested speculation to
determine whether facemask usage by the public diminished the transmission
of Covid, because there is an avalanche of data from the past year that is
conclusive that facemasks were generally correlated with an increase of
covid incidence and severity by literally every conceivable metric. This is
obvious to anyone with a smidgen of intellectual honesty from a cursory
look at how places that had nearly universal mask compliance did not fare
any better versus those that did not. This, however, doesn’t begin to
capture the real story. When you break down the data by geography and
seasonality, you can see that the basic structure of the “curve” was
identical everywhere, literally, regardless of what policies were in place.
For example, in the US, the contiguous part of the country is broken down
into 5 distinct geographical areas based on climate by NOAA, and the curves
for all of the states and counties in each of these areas are identical.
The only difference between such places is that the curve is larger and
higher in places where there was higher compliance with masks and more
draconian lockdown policies enforced. This remained true even when
disaggregated to a county-by-county level for all 3,143 counties in the US,
as was done by the data analysts at RationalGround. They further discovered
that even when you looked at places that at one point had mask mandates and
at another point did not, irrelevant of which came first, they uniformly
did worse with mask usage than without (and that was true even when
filtering out all of the same confounding factors); and the overall
difference was stark – 17 new confirmed covid infections/100,000 people/day
for the non-mask mandate states/counties vs a whopping 27/100,000
people/day new confirmed covid infections for states/counties with a mask
mandate. These results were often in spite of factors that one would
logically think would tend to cause increased transmission, such as
population density, ie places with higher population density and less mask
usage did better than similarly geographically situated places with lower
population density that had more mask usage. At a minimum, it is as
axiomatic as “correlation doesn’t equal causation” that “lack of
correlation disproves causation” (and it is additionally in violation of
the famous definition of insanity “one who persists in repeating the same
action and thinks this time it will work”). And unlike the studies that
purport to show masks work - sophisticated sophistry disguised by byzantine
regressional analyses that forecloses the possibility of any layperson (and
even many non-laypeople) deciphering the complex equations, these analyses
are reproducible by anyone using the same publicly available data.

The absolute failure of facemasks to exhibit any downward impact on covid
rates can’t be dismissed to merely the public’s inability to use masks
properly.

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