I love these charts. Here is Connecticut. The Governor is trying to claim that the mask mandate did the trick. Bad news for him is that there is a lag from cases to hospitalizations. Masks supposedly work immediately. Hospitalizations on average run a week or more from infection. They were clearly plateaued when the mask mandate was issued. So Connecticut cases had already been declining before the mask mandate went into effect. Any mask mandate has only an incremental effect on usage in any event. How much additional use occurred in Connecticut? We don’t know. And among all the things occurring in Connecticut at this time–how would you in any methodologically sound method attribute any specific effect to the increment in mask wearing. Note too that the epidemic curve for Connecticut is also a classic looking unmitigated epidemic curve, common to the Northeastern states. So I don’t think anything was going to change the way things went in that state, it was too late. Now, having said all that, I want to emphasize again that I suspect masks could help prevent transmission in some cases and I certainly would never discourage people from wearing them. But people should be told the truth and should know the risks of believing that wearing a mask will definitely protect them. And I really am concerned about issues related to cloth masks.
