There are still millions of people out there breathing through cotton because they think it does something to stop the 'Rona.
BEHOLD:
Yeah, I get it. It's just one chart.
A chart that contains publicly available data, but just one chart nonetheless.
More on this chart that you probably love or hate depending on your addiction to religious face coverings.
From City Journal:
The graph tracks the results of a natural experiment that occurred nationwide during the pandemic. Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.
As you can see from the lines' similar trajectories, the mask mandates hardly controlled the virus. By the time the mandates were introduced in New York and other states in the spring of 2020 (at the left side of the graph), infections had already been declining in those states, and the mandates didn't prevent a surge later that year, when cases rose and fell in nearly identical trajectories regardless of states' mask policies. The pandemic's second year saw slight deviations in both directions, but those reflected the seasonality of the virus and the geography of mask mandates, which remained more common in northern states. Cases were higher in the non-mandate states last summer, when the seasonal surge in the South disproportionately hit Republican states without mandates, but those states went on to have fewer cases during the winter, when the seasonal surge in the North hit more Democratic states with mandates.
Everything was a wash. Whether you wore masks religiously or just went about normal life, the results were the same (although only one of these strategies cost people their jobs, demonized neighbors, and spent untold billions of taxpayer dollars).
The cumulative number of deaths were the same too:
Both graphs were created by Ian Miller, a data analyst who wrote Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates. Maybe pick up a copy or two for your fearful friends who are afraid of flying now that we're not required to wear thin mesh masks in heavily-filtered air cabins!!
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
