That is, if they have compliance rates that are comparable to the countries that do have legal recourse, do we have reason to think legal recourse would have gotten them better compliance?
For an example, I was driving through rural Alabama, which has a state wide mask mandate, and at every convivence store I stopped in, everyone was masked. Right next door in Georgia, which has the opposite of statewide mask mandate (the governor made local mandates illegal), almost no one was masking.
The same is true for my home county. There's a mask mandate--everyone wears a mask. Move one county over--no mandate and almost no masks.
They definitely have high numbers of covid. So does most everyone. :(
As of October--How often have you worn a face mask outside your home to protect yourself or others from coronavirus?
Sweden:
Always------- 4.3%
Not at all-- 76.7%
Spain:
Always------ 95.8%
Not at all-- 0.3%
I confess I have stopped driving on these numbers. Seems way more noise then signal. Death rates, for example, at a naive guidance look worse for Spain. Do you also have a good launch point to get caught up on analysts?
>Death rates, for example, at a naive guidance look worse for Spain.
Spain is about 4 times as densely populated as Sweden, you'd expect spread and death rates for a communicable disease to be higher.
My question on accuracy is more on how well we know the source. A scientific online passive poll is likely still pretty bad. Especially if taken from a partisan audience.
Also, just to emphasize. I don't see any obvious points. But that not includes agreeing with the approach Sweden took. I just don't understand much of the reporting focusing on the voluntary aspect without establishing that Sweden had bad compliance with mask wearing.
>without establishing that Sweden had bad compliance with mask wearing.
I think what you're seeing is that it's taken as a given because no one is claiming the opposite. Many of the people stating this live in Sweden, and it's obviously not hard to walk around in public and take notice of the fact that very few people are wearing masks
Here's a few articles with reports from people living in Sweden estimating that less than 10% of people wear masks in public [3,4].
[1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-08/22/c_139308631.htm [2] https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1279755135892234241/photo/... [3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/sweden-really-lik... [4] https://www.aier.org/article/masks-in-sweden/
[1]https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/study-shows-which-res...
"while many of the available interventions work, mask mandates stand out for their effectiveness and relative lack of economic tradeoffs. “Mandatory mask policies seem to be as effective as policies that have higher costs,” says Tookes."
The article is saying that mandating masks has a positive impact, but recommending them does nothing.
Even here in the US, some mandates have gotten worse compliance than others.
Because I really do feel that systematically, it's not legal enforcement that is the issue.
99% of it seems to me would be workplace orders - if all governments spaces (aka public transit) require masks, and most corporations require public masks, then it's going to be hard to go to to many places without them.
Maybe however a lot of individual small restaurants and gyms would flaunt the rules, even under threat of shame, which is maybe understandable since the proprietors are facing basically collapse and losing their entire life's savings etc..