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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

If you're talking about wearing masks in public, it looks like their numbers are low--implying that voluntary compliance isn't working great.

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.

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I haven't seen reporting on their numbers in compliance. The reporting is mostly like this one, focusing on it being voluntary. But then not stating how effective is otherwise it was.

They definitely have high numbers of covid. So does most everyone. :(

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1114375/wearing-a-face-m...

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%

Thanks! Do we know how accurate those are?

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?

Those numbers are self reported from scientific polls. But a 90+ percentage point difference even when self reported, probably means there's a large difference.

>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.

Agreed on the magnitude. The size of relative spike also looks worse. Such that I really don't know any obvious points to draw.

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.

Sure the polls that show Swedish people aren't wearing masks could have a huge margin of error. But everyone I've found shows numbers well under 10%. Here's another 2 polls that show around 5% of respondents say they wear masks [1,2]. I assume I could find more if I read Swedish.

>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/

Missed this. Thanks!

Voluntary compliance is working great: people can do whatever they feel like doing, which is literally the point of voluntary compliance.

Or, the point of voluntary compliance is to balance between personal freedom and infection rate, in which case it's a failure.

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