Forget about masks, do mandates work?

 If you assume people are liars, then you have to assume nothing works

The above graphic is making the rounds on twitter. I came across it from Kyle Becker, who elaborates thusly:

Good morning, mask fanatics. Take a good look at this chart. Blue are mask mandate states, red are *free states.* This is called *NO CORRELATION.* That means your mask mandates have no statistically significant effect fighting COVID. Just thought you should know.🔻 pic.twitter.com/StS4bU1wuq

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) April 16, 2021

This, of course, meets with the usual challenges from pro-maskers. What counts as a mask mandate? What timeframe is this? How do we even know what percentage of people wore masks? 

It's that last one that tears the challenger's entire argument apart. There are only two ways to get that information: observation or survey. Realistically, survey is really the only way to go. Yes, there could be people on corners in cities and towns across America acting like traffic study observers, but for masks. Once you describe it, you realize just how unrealistic that approach is, though. 

The more likely situation is that pollsters reached out and asked something like, "When you go out, what percentage of people do you estimate are wearing a mask?" The objections to polling methodology are familiar, but they all boil down to two things: people are inaccurate and people lie.

Well, if you assume either of those things, then you can't really know anything. Or, at least, you can't ever rule anything out. If there was a strong correlation between mask mandates and low (or high) COVID death rates, we could point at something. What the challengers are doing is playing lack of evidence is evidence—for what they want to believe.

Sadly, it still doesn't help them. Let's agree with them for a moment that there's no way to know if the X-axis is reliable. If we just compare the death rate to mandate status, we see there is no clustering at either end. That is, a mandate in itself has no correlation with COVID death rates.

A public policy is only effective insofar as it fosters compliance. By introducing doubt into the compliance aspect, the pro-masker cedes the contest over mandates. He was so eager to give himself more options that he never stopped to consider what they were. Assuming that mandates work on people and masks work on viral spread:

a) Mandates work, but masks don't work 

b) Masks work, but mandates don't work (and people are liars) 

c) Neither masks nor mandates work (and people are still liars)

Needless to say, options (a) and (c) are unacceptable to the pro-masker. So while he may be completely right that masks work, he's still boxed in to admitting you can't mandate their use. 

Unfortunately, as we've seen in viral videos, the pro-mask position has coupled to an authoritarian position, meaning the pro-masker now sees his next best option as enforcement with stiffer penalties, rather than ramping up a PR campaign. In any case, don't expect the arguments over mask mandates (or the mandates themselves) to end anytime soon.