Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Germany has had strict requirements for people to use N95-style masks and… a raging coronaplague to go with those masks (but the failure of two-way N95 masking should not shake our faith in one-way N95 masking! Don’t stay home to avoid COVID-19, get on a plane with an N95 mask, eat in restaurants, stay in hotels, etc.). There was a natural experiment done recently in which Hamburg maintained its mask order while the rest of Germany dropped it. Here are the curves:

Two years into the forced masking of the general public (except in Florida!), the Science experts at the New York Times give us “Maskless Flying: What might a more effective mask mandate look like?”

On Sunday, I spent nearly five hours on an airplane, flying home from the West Coast. For long stretches of the flight, whenever the crew was serving food and drinks, many passengers were not wearing masks. Even when people did have their masks on, many wore them below their noses.

My flight was the day before a federal judge threw out the C.D.C.’s transportation mask mandate, but my experience was typical, as any recent flier can attest. The mandate was already more of an aspiration than a reality, which indicates that the ruling may be less important than the furor over it suggests. The Covid-19 virus, after all, doesn’t take a break from spreading so that you can enjoy the in-flight beverage service.

As Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist, puts it, a mask mandate with as many exceptions as the airline mandate is like a submarine that closes three of its five doors.

The trouble with the transportation mask mandate was that it was both too broad and too lenient.

Its breadth required people to muzzle their faces for long periods of time, and most people don’t enjoy doing so. (If you doubt that, check out the gleeful responses of airline passengers and school children when told they didn’t have to wear masks anymore.)

The transportation mandate had so many exceptions that many Americans understandably questioned its worth. Travelers took off their masks to eat and drink. Some flight attendants removed their masks to make announcements. Some passengers wore their masks on their chins. The mandate also did not require N95 and KN95 masks, which are more effective against the virus than cloth masks or standard medical masks.

Rigorous laboratory tests show that masks reduce Covid transmission, but supporting real-world evidence tends to be much weaker.

The most glaring example in the U.S. is that liberal communities, where masks are a cherished symbol of solidarity, have experienced nearly as much Covid spread as conservative communities, where masks are a hated symbol of oppression. Another example is school mask mandates, which don’t seem to have had much effect. A third example is Hong Kong, where mask wearing is very popular (although often not with N95 or KN95 masks, Osterholm notes); Hong Kong has just endured a horrific Covid wave, among the world’s worst since the pandemic began.

So the Science was perfect and should be #Followed (according to previous NYT articles), but the American public let down the Scientists. Regarding schools, see Face mask mandates in schools were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission for data from 600,000 Spanish schoolchildren. On the righteous versus unrighteous community data, see the following chart (I can’t find a source for it, unfortunately):

Following the Science accelerated COVID-19 plagues by encouraging people to leave the safety of their homes:

Osterholm, who spent 15 years as Minnesota’s state epidemiologist and has advised both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington, argues that much of the U.S. public health community has exaggerated the value of broad mask mandates. KN95 and N95 masks reduce the virus’s spread, he believes, but mandates like the one on airlines do little good.

“Public health advice has been way off the mark, all along, about mask protection,” he told me. “We have given the public a sense of a level of protection that is just not warranted.”

Note that this is exactly what the Swedish MD/PhDs (i.e., anti-Science heretics) said in March 2020. Ordering masks would give people a false sense of safety when what people actually needed to do was stay at home (if vulnerable) or maintain physical separation. Could it be that America’s public health officials are responsible for more COVID-19 deaths than anyone else? What could be worse than encouraging people to leave the safety of their houses and rely on a saliva-soaked face rag for protection from an aerosol virus?

The rest of the article speculates on what the Great Minds of Science might yet accomplish with redesigned mask mandates to keep us all safe from future COVID variants.

On a related note, “Judge’s Ruling on the CDC Mask Mandate Highlights the Limits of the Agency’s Power” (KHN) is about a CDC that still has the power to order landlords to continue providing apartments to tenants who don’t pay rent:

“If CDC can’t impose an unintrusive requirement to wear a mask to prevent a virus from going state to state, then it literally has no power to do anything,” said public health law expert Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

For the public health technocrats, it is “unintrusive” to force a 2-year-old to wear a mask for 16 hours straight (Uber, airport, flight 1, airport 2, flight 2, airport 3, Uber).