On masks and misconceptions
Did masks keep Japan's Covid deaths low?
One reason that masks were widely mandated outside of East Asia in 2020 was because many people assumed that the reason for this…
…despite this…
…was this.
[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/28/national/science-health/masks-helped-fight-coronavirus/]
So that must mean that while unmasked Europeans and Americans were being infected in March 2020, the Japanese were fully masked up, especially in places full of late middle-aged men such as the Japanese parliament.
[Taken from a live-stream of the Japanese parliament on March 27th 2020]
Okay, so most back-bench politicians weren’t masking up, but I bet the guys in charge of the pandemic response were all wearing N95s.
[https://japan.kantei.go.jp/98_abe/actions/202003/_00046.html]
Er, so when did the politicians start taking masking seriously?
[https://japan.kantei.go.jp/98_abe/actions/202004/_00001.html]
That’s more like it! And I bet they masked up just in time to prevent infections from rising exponentially.
[Graph of estimated date of infection based on symptom onset data produced by Hiroshi Nishura for the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare. For details of the first state of emergency see here]
And remind me, what happened after masks were mandated throughout the west?
As the original cargo cult will tell you, causality is a tricky thing to understand.
Update 24 April 2022
The mistaken belief about masks keeping Japan’s Covid deaths low is taken apart in greater detail in the post below.
