The Homa Files

A team of northeastern academic researchers, doing a  “Covid States Project”,  recently published their most recent survey of  how “the human behaviors that have been shown to inhibit the spread of COVID-19 have evolved across the US since April, 2020.”

Said differently, they were evaluating whether or not people were complying with the CDC’s COVID mitigation guidance.

The researchers found that, since Spring, mask wearing compliance has increased from slightly over 50% to over 75%  (the light yellow diagonal  line running from the lower left to upper right corners).

Hmmm.

Mask wearing has increased to a relatively high level, yet the number of confirmed cases are spiking to record highs.

Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?

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Since mask wearing appears to be highly correlated with the incidence of COVID case counts, one might conclude that wearing masks might “cause” COVID to spread.

But, since correlation is necessarily causation, that would be silly, right?

Well, not so fast.

Note the red and green lines on the above graph.

They represent the percentage of people avoiding contact with people outside their home (red line) and those avoiding crowded or public places (green line).

Both of those “socially distancing” behaviors are declining.

Why is that?

There are a couple of possible explanations.

Maybe mask-wearing lags case count spikes … when people notice cases spiking up, they mask up for protection.

Or, remember when Fauci & Friends were avidly anti-mask wearing?

One of their arguments was that mask-wearing instills a false sense of confidence … prompting people towards more risky behavior (e.g. less social distancing) … with the thought that masks are making them less vulnerable to infection.

Maybe F&F were right at the time.

More recently, the CDC Director testified that mask-wearing in more effective than vaccines …   that COVID cases will be contained if people just wear masks.

English translation: Go party, just wear a mask.

But, if masks are only marginally effective (say, 15% to 30%), then mask ineffectiveness is 70% to 85% … and, thus, increased public contact drives an increase in the number of cases.

For info re: mask effectiveness, see: Gallup says that 90% regularly wear masks…

In other words, mask-wearing and COVID cases may be both correlated and causally related if people are motivated to behave badly by a false sense of confidence.

Of course, Redfield would say that wearing masks when behaving badly might not prevent infection, but at least reduces the risk.

See, it’s as simple as that …

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Bottom line: If you want to decrease your COVID risk, stay away from public contact, especially in crowded places.

If you must have public contact, wear a mask.

It won’t necessarily insulate you from infection, but it improves your odds a bit.

Got it?

This entry was posted on December 9, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19, Masks - Face coverings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.