Name: Do Masks Work?
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Do Masks Work?

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inWe are surrounded by sheep people wearing masks. Photographs taken during the past year will forever be recognizable as dating from the era of covid hysteria. Dr. Fraudci and others assure us that masks work, although if you plot cases, hospitalizations or deaths against dates when mask mandates were adopted, it is impossible to see any effect. And studies that purport to “prove” the effectiveness of masks fall apart .At , Spike Hampson applies a simple test. He compares the combined covid death rates of the ten states that have never had mask mandates with the combined death rates of the 40 states that do have mask mandates. The result:States with a mask mandate: 13.0 deaths per 10,000 population.States with no mask mandate: 12.6 deaths per 10,000 population.But maybe the problem is that some states waited too long to impose a mask mandate. So Hampson tried another test: the ten states that have never had mask mandates vs. the ten states that imposed such mandates the earliest. The result:[T]he “bottom ten” outperform the “top ten” by a small but noteworthy margin (12.6 deaths per 10,000 versus 13.3 deaths per 10,000).Do masks kill people? Probably not, but they certainly don’t appear to do any good. Of course, mask advocates could argue that the states that imposed mandates did so because they had more covid than the states that didn’t, and their numbers would be even worse but for the wearing of masks. That hypothesis could be tested, but given the pretty much universal spread of the Wuhan virus, it lacks any plausibility.The best we can say for masks is that they probably don’t do much harm. Shutdowns are worse–equally ineffective, but with catastrophic consequences, especially for our young people. Other than Operation Warp Speed, our entire response to the covid epidemic has been a fiasco.Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.Please enable JavaScript to view theCopyright © 2020 by Power Line and respective authors.

inWe are surrounded by sheep people wearing masks. Photographs taken during the past year will forever be recognizable as dating from the era of covid hysteria. Dr. Fraudci and others assure us that masks work, although if you plot cases, hospitalizations or deaths against dates when mask mandates were adopted, it is impossible to see any effect. And studies that purport to “prove” the effectiveness of masks fall apart .At , Spike Hampson applies a simple test. He compares the combined covid death rates of the ten states that have never had mask mandates with the combined death rates of the...

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