Various “public health” authorities are openly jonesing for re-instituting a mask mandate, and the CDC continues to insist that masks are an essential protection against COVID, and probably voting Republican or owning a gun, too. One of the CDC’s key pieces of evidence was its own study of over 500 counties where the school districts observed the mask mandates and had lower rates of COVID infections. Here’s the chart the CDC produced:
Well guess what? A closer look controverts this finding. In a peer-reviewed study published recently in the Journal of Infection, two researchers replicated the CDC findings, but then reviewed a wider data set of more than 1,800 counties, over a longer time horizon, and found a lower rate of COVID infections than the masked-up counties. Here’s the revised chart:
Read the whole thing (the full article is not paywalled, is short, and relatively readable), but here’s the key part if you’re short of time:
The association between school mask mandates and cases did not persist in the extended sample. . . By the end of the ninth week after reopening average daily pediatric case rates in counties without mask mandates were 15.8 per 100,000 while counties with mandates averaged 18.3 per 100,000; the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.12).
The admission that there is a low statistical difference between the two methodologies at the very least means the effectiveness of masks has been hugely overstated. This study is unlikely to slow up the masks-uber-alles mentality of “public health” officials who in most cases are not doctors, but instead have advanced degrees in “health care administration.”
Hat tip: Justin Hart.
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