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Comment by bigodbiel | Hacker News Reader

Without analyzing more closely which jurisdictions were “masked” we can’t make a thorough conclusion on mask mandates. Masks have been shown to have some effectiveness, but not necessarily its mandates, as the latter does not imply appropriate usage.

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We don't need "a thorough conclusion" in order to decide if mask mandates should be enforced, just a good-enough conclusion. Demanding "thorough" is a great way to induce analysis paralysis rather than make an operationally effective decision.

It's awfully hard to make any sort of decision if the data isn't made available, yes?

The article lists the four jurisdictions which had mandates: St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City and Jackson County.

What more do you want?

It's fun to cherry-pick the literature:

"Our findings show that the Public Mask Mandate significantly lowers the incidence of developing all COVID-19 symptoms by 0.29 percentage points." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8379388/

"The mask mandate is consistently associated with lower infection and mortality rates in the short term. Early adoption of mask-wearing mandates is also consistently associated with lower COVID-19 infection rates in the long term, indicating the link between a government’s intervention speed and policy instrument efficacy." - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/puar.13426

Wouldn't the data they gather include artifacts of improper usage and ultimately feed into their conclusion on whether mandates work?

If your point is that looking at counties and assigning mask_mandate = 1 vs mask_mandate = 0 isn't rigorous, agreed.

If you look at the series the different in case rates started before the mandate, making me think it's more about behavior differences in cities vs rural areas than the mandate (makes sense).

No, nothing I said at all is in regards to what you mention.

I'm replying to the point that mask mandates do not imply proper mask usage, which is almost certainly correct. However the usage errors the general population will make with masks should show up in the overall case rates and be accounted for in the data and conclusions here.

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