The pandemic has eased, but not the compulsion of many Americans to cover their faces. Fully vaccinated adults are still wearing masks on their solitary walks outdoors, and officials have been enforcing mask mandates on some city-dwellers and students. After obligating passengers to wear masks for nearly two years, some airlines and railroads have finally dropped their requirements in response to Monday’s ruling by US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle declaring the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation unlawful. It’s welcome news, though long overdue. 

A simple remedy might help some maskaholics. It’s a graph that should be required viewing for everyone still wearing a mask and every public official and journalist who still insists that mask mandates “control the spread.” 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. 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. 

As you can see from the lines’ similar trajectories, the mask mandates hardly controlled the virus, and if you add up all the numbers on those two lines, you find that the mask mandates made zero difference. The cumulative rate of infection over the course of the pandemic was about 24% in the mandate states as well as in the non-mandate states. Their cumulative rates of COVID mortality were virtually identical, too (in fact, there were slightly more deaths per capita in the states with mask mandates). 

Read all about it 

If this hasn’t persuaded you to take off your mask, you can find lots more reasons in “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates” by Ian Miller, the Brownstone Institute data analyst who created the graph. Miller’s book documents how mask mandates were implemented without scientific justification, how they failed around the world and how public officials and journalists have made fools of themselves by pretending otherwise. 

Bowing to political expediency and media hysteria, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization recommended masking the public, despite the fact that randomized clinical trials had shown there was “no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission,” as WHO summarized the scientific literature. Mandating masks gave the illusion of doing something against the virus. When the initial spring wave in 2020 subsided, public officials and journalists claimed that the mandates had worked, and they kept up the pretense even when COVID surged again later that year despite the continuing mandates. 

This pattern of magical thinking persisted throughout the pandemic. Again and again, journalists and public-health officials would single out a state or a nation that had supposedly tamed COVID by forcing citizens to wear masks — and then these masks would promptly fail to prevent an unprecedented wave of infections. In summer 2020, Politico praised Rhode Island’s “wear-your-damn-mask” policy in an article headlined “How the Smallest State Engineered a COVID Comeback.” A survey in the autumn found 96% of Rhode Islanders were wearing masks, the highest in America, yet that winter the state went on to suffer one of the nation’s worst COVID surges. 

Meantime, the media’s favorite experts kept predicting doom for states that never mandated masks, like Florida, or that ended the mandates early in 2021, like Iowa. Over the course of the pandemic, both states have done better than the national average in measures of COVID mortality as well as overall excess mortality (the number of deaths more than normal from all causes). 

Media narrative 

The media’s narrative about masks extended throughout the world. “COVID-19 Was Consuming India, Until Nearly Everyone Started Wearing Masks,” a Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed at the end of 2020, but then India’s infection rate soared to four times higher than the previous peak. “Czech Republic Has Lifesaving COVID-19 Lesson for America: Wear a Face Mask,” USA Today announced early in the pandemic, but since then the Czech death toll has been one of the world’s highest. 

If you’re still not persuaded to take off the mask, consider one more graph from Miller. It compares Germany, whose stringent policies have made it a media darling, with Sweden, widely vilified for refusing to lock down or mandate masks. Sweden’s initial COVID surge was blamed on those lax policies, but Sweden stuck to them and actually discouraged masks in most situations. As indicated on the graph, surveys during the pandemic showed that fewer than 10% of Swedes bothered to wear masks. In Germany, by contrast, more than 80% did so, but look at the similar trajectories of the daily COVID death toll in both countries from summer 2020 through March of this year. 

The masks in Germany obviously didn’t “beat COVID.” From the start of the pandemic through this spring, the cumulative rate of COVID mortality has been slightly higher in Sweden than in Germany (by about 15%), but the rate of overall excess mortality has been slightly higher in Germany (by about 8%). Just as in the US, the mask mandates in Germany produced no net benefits but plenty of inconvenience as well as outright harm. Covering up may give the maskaholics a false sense of security — but they could breathe more easily if they’d just face the facts. 

Excerpted with permission from City Journal.