Yes they were effective in getting people to wear masks in public places, but the goal was to lower the transmission of Covid not to make people wear masks at the grocery. By that measure I don’t think there is a ton of evidence they were successful.
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Aerosols linger and build up. Odds are masks in the grocery store DO reduce the viral load of the air, and make shopping safer for everyone.
One of the places I go is so well ventilated it may not matter. The other stores, not so much.
Also, the mask mandate helped me to get my mom to wear a mask when I visit her. She’s had a lot of health issues, and I’ve needed to spend a lot of time close to her.
Perhaps we’re talking about very different mask mandates.
This is an interesting post. My common-sense notion is that a similarly vented/crowded grocery store, is 20% as dangerous but has 500% the customers.
But then that’s just one store. Obviously there’s many restaurants, bars, etc. per a store.
In any case, I think in less demented times, mandates are kind of just symbolic of what people want.
Similar to seatbelt laws, or rules about wearing clothes… it’s more that we want official rules about “being good” than police enforcement.
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Masks are also for the employees who would have much more exposure than a customer who was in and out in 15 minutes.
I think he’s an idiot who should have been tossed off the plane.
Why is John Kerry a “climate envoy” anyway?
Isn’t Al Gore still alive?
As a (relative to the US) far-left person, I’m so frustrated at that. I’m sure he’s vaccinated, it might be an opportunistic photo of 2% of a flight where he was unmasked, but come on, guy.
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It’s funny that certain elected leaders ran their lemmings off a cliff and wasted what could have been a useful public health policy?
I find it kind of funny (& I find it kinda sad) that you think the mandates weren’t useless to begin with, Mr President.
Why is that sad? If I need to go into a grocery store I would like to limit my exposure to COVID, and requiring everyone to wear a mask reduces my risk. County level data has shown significant differences in COVID spread where masks had been mandated. State level mandates were generally ignored at the local level in rural areas. Most cities had stronger mask mandates if the state did not. So useless only because they were ignored.
Vietnam and Japan seem to have controlled the virus almost entirely by having everyone wear a mask.
“Mask mandates don’t work because too many people ignore them” is a very sad state of affairs.
Japan figured out early on that the things to avoid were crowds and enclosed spaces, and that masks would reduce transmission. Unlike western countries where idiots worried that wearing a mask would poison them with their own breath.
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Japan also doesn’t test asymptomatic people like crazy like we do.
Funny (and sad) that Japan figured out masks in 2020, but in 2019, when mask wearing was also part of the culture, they had a huge flu outbreak.
Someone will N the R, surely.
So look at their death rates, if you think they are underreporting cases.
Look at Singapore, or Vietnam. Countries that immediately turned to face masks.
There might be some confounding variables there when you’re looking at countries all in east Asia, particularly when other countries in the region with different approaches to masks have had similar results.
Moving out of East/Southeast Asia, I hear Czechia, who adopted masks early & often, may have a lesson for us:
Also worth noting is that Japan has a crazy high population density. Especially cities like Tokyo and Osaka.