The Daily Signal - Do Masks Work? What the Data Shows

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Do masks really work? Can they help contain the spread of COVID-19? Why does some data show that mask mandates in the U.S. and other countries did not prevent surges in COVID-19 cases? Doug Badger, a visiting fellow in domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, and Norbert Michel, director of Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis, join "The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss these questions and more. We also cover these stories: The Trump administration announces broad changes to the plan to distribute approved COVID-19 vaccines.  President Donald Trump stands by remarks he made at a rally before a mob breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, calling his comments "totally appropriate.” Trump speaks out against big social media companies after Twitter permanently bans him from its site and Facebook announces that his account is suspended at least through Inauguration Day.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, January 13th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Do masks really work? That is the question countless people across the country are asking as the COVID-19 pandemic continues on. Doug Badger, a visiting fellow in domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, and Norbert Michelle, director of the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis, who authored a Heritage Foundation report called Mask Mandates, Do They Work? Are there better ways to control COVID-19 outbreaks? Join me today on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that they are making broad changes to the COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan.

Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, said during an interview with Good Morning America that the administration had been holding back about half of the coronavirus vaccine stock to ensure that there was enough doses to inoculate those at greatest risk. But now they are making the full vaccine supply available, among other distribution changes. We have seen now that the administration in the states has been too narrowly focused. And so what are we doing? Three things. First, we have already made available every dose of vaccine. So we had been holding back second doses as a safety stock. We now believe that our manufacturing is predictable enough that we can ensure second doses are available for people from ongoing production. So everything is now available to our states and our health care providers. Second, we are calling on our governors to now vaccinate people age 65 and over and under age 65 with a comorbidity,

because we have got to expand the group. We've already distributed more vaccine than we have health care workers and people in nursing homes. Third, we've got to get to more channels of administration. We've got to get it to pharmacies, get it to community health centers. And we are here and we will deploy teams to support states doing mass vaccination efforts if they wish to do so. It has been overly hospitalized so far in too many states. So we have the vaccine. We need the demand is there.

We need to get these orders. We have supplies that have not yet been ordered a vaccine. President Trump is standing by remarks he gave before the Capitol was breached on Wednesday that ultimately left five people dead. Here's what Trump had to say via MSNBC. So if you read my speech and many people have done it and I've seen it both in the papers and in the media on television, it's been analyzed and people thought that what I said was totally appropriate. President Trump spoke out against big social media companies after Twitter permanently banned the president from their site, and Facebook announced that Trump's account would be suspended at least through inauguration day. I think that big tech is doing a horrible thing for our country and to our country,

and I believe it's going to be a catastrophic mistake for them, the president told reporters on Tuesday. The tech companies crack down on the president came after Trump spoke at a rally, on the National Mall last Wednesday, in which he encouraged attendees to mark to the Capitol building, where Congress was meeting to certify the electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election. Many political and social leaders are blaming the president for inciting the violent riot that occurred at the Capitol after the rally, but the president is pushing back on these claims. Trump says his remarks at the rally were appropriate, adding, they've analyzed my speech and my words and my final paragraph, my final sentence, and everybody, to the T, thought it was totally

appropriate. Vermont's Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy says his Republican Senate colleagues, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas should remove themselves from the Senate Judiciary Committee while the breaching of the Capitol on Wednesday is being investigated. Leahy said via the Hill that both of them wanted to subvert the will of the people, wanted to tell the whole world and the United States that we did not. have an honest election. I can't imagine any senator doing that and then serving on the judiciary. The Harvard Institute of Politics announced Tuesday that they have removed New

York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik from its senior advisory committee. In a letter announcing the decision, Harvard Dean Doug Elmendorf explained the reasoning for the Congresswoman's removal, writing that Stefani has made public assertions about voter fraud in November's presidential election that have no basis in evidence, and she has made public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect. Moreover, these assertions and statements do not reflect policy disagreements, but bear on the foundations of the electoral process through which this country's leaders are chosen. Stefanik responded to the Harvard Institute of Politics on Twitter, writing the decision by Harvard's administration to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought.

The ivory towers march toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views demonstrates the sneering disdain for everyday Americans and will instill a culture of fear for students. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Doug Badger and Norbert Michelle on the effectiveness of masks. Americans use firearms to defend themselves between 500,000 and 2 million times every year. But God forbid that my mother has ever faced with a scenario where she has to stop a threat to her life. But if she is, I hope politicians, protected by professional armed security, didn't strip her of the right to use the firearms she can handle most competently. To watch the rest of heritage expert Amy Swear's testimony on assault weapons

before the House Judiciary Committee head to the Heritage Foundation YouTube Channel. There you'll find talks, events, and documentaries, backed with the reputation of the nation's most broadly supported Public Policy Research Institute. Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe and share. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Doug Badger. He's a visiting fellow in domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, and Norbert Michelle, director of the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis. Doug and Norbert, thanks so much for coming on the Daily Signal podcast.

Thanks for having us. Well, it's great to have you both with us. You both authored a Heritage Foundation report called Mask Mandates. Do they work? Are they better ways to control COVID-19 outbreaks? So, Doug, can you just start off by telling us what the report is about? Sure. It was actually a collaboration between Norbert and me.

Norbert was looking at counties that either had mask mandates themselves or there were state mask mandates that covered that county or both. So you looked at the U.S. I was looking at Italy by comparison, a country that had a national mask mandate. And the question we asked was, did these mandates prevent the big run-up in cases that occurred in the fall and that we're really still in here in early January of 2021. I saw in Italy, we presented data to show that it really didn't work. Norbert looked more specifically at U.S. counties,

and the question was, what happened in those counties, Norbert, that had mask mandates in place? And what we saw was, you know, much like what we saw in Italy, which was that virtually all of those counties already had mask mandates in place. When you look at where are all the cases, you find that all those counties had mask mandates, basically. Out of the top 100, the counties with the 100 most, largest amount of cases, 97 of them had a mandate in place. When you look at the top 25, all 25 had a mandate in place. And most of those were in place before October. Only about 107.

10 that weren't in place before October. So, you know, whether a mask works to help slow the transmission is one thing. But whether these mask mandates have worked is another thing. The mandates themselves, you know, clearly didn't prevent the surge. That's the data just clearly supports that. Well, on that note, in the piece, you all point out that while mask wearing can help reduce transmission of COVID-19, data shows that mask mandates in the U.S. and other countries did not prevent a search of cases. So, Doug, can we talk more about why this is the case? Sure. I think there are two reasons for that. First, and I want to be really clear about this, we are in the paper, but I want to make sure we're not misunderstood. We are not saying that

you shouldn't wear a mask or that mask wearing does no good. And there is a good deal of evidence out there that both the CDC and other the World Health organizations and other bodies have found that say that if you have COVID and you don't know it, a mask makes it less likely that you will spread the disease to other people. So there is certainly an argument to be made that these have some value in suppressing infection. The problem is that what we know is that even with mask wearing and social distancing and other precautions we take, to prevent infections that a lot of people get infected anyway. It's not that masks don't work,

it's that they're not perfect. And they don't suppress the infection. And where we fail in our public health policy has been in what we do once people get infected. We need to identify, do a better job of identifying people with the infection, separating them from people who aren't, yet infected and also trying to identify people that they may have infected. That's where the policy

has fallen down. It's not that mask wearing is a bad thing. It's just that it's really insufficient, as Norbert points out, the numbers are irrefutable in terms of the run-up in cases that's occurred despite mask mandates and relatively widespread mask wearing. Well, Doug, you had mentioned that you were looking specifically at Italy and their mandate. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that country fared even though they had a national mask mandate? Yeah, unfortunately for them and now we're talking about a mask mandate in Italy. It's a thousand euro fine if you're outside your house without a mask. It's enforced by the military police and the local authorities. So they're very deadly serious about the mask mandate.

And what happened is that as much as we read about the pandemic in the early days in Italy, going back to March and April, the run-up in cases that they had in October and November and into December was far in excess of what they had back in March and April when, obviously, there were no mask mandates in place. So, again, it was an earnest effort by the government, along with other things, partial lockdowns and so forth that they deployed throughout the fall and early winter. And unfortunately, it just simply did not curb the increase in infections there. Well, Norbert, you also unpack how the Centers for Disease Control believe that masks have a source control value. What is source control and how does this work? When you look at the question of do masks themselves help, you know, stop the spread, right? Does a face covering help reduce the spread or the speed of the disease with which it spreads? You have to ask a few different questions.

And one of those is source control, right? So does it control the disease at the source? And specifically, so does that, in other words, if we're talking about, Does it have source control? We're saying does it block release of the respiratory particles that someone exhales? Right. So the source of where those respiratory particles are coming from, that is source control. So the CDC for a long time now has said that they think that there is at least some evidence to suggest that masks do have some source control.

They do stop people, say, if you're going to sneeze or if you're yelling and sort of, I hate to use the word spitting, but spraying those particles out into the environment, the mask can help sort of stop that. It can reduce the speed with which things get out and reduce, I would imagine, the total amount of those things that can get out. So in that sense, it can help protect people who are not yet infected from becoming infected. And that's the source control part. Yeah, Norbert did a very good job of describing the source control. That means if I have it and don't know it, I'm protecting you against me, right? Because I'm carrying the disease. The second is protection, and that is to say, if I don't have it and I wear a mask, will the mask protect me from getting it from somebody else? So now I'm no longer the carrier. I'm the person who is not infected. Now, CDC in November

changed its guideline and said, yeah, masks do have a protection value. Unfortunately, there's only been one controlled experiment in that. It was conducted in Denmark with 6,000 participants. And it concluded quite the opposite, that it's not going to keep me from getting it if I'm not infected. It doesn't have a protective value. But if I have it, it will reduce the chances that I will infect somebody else. That's the source control value. We talked about how during the surge in the fall, 97 of the 100 counties with the most confirmed cases had either a county-level mask mandate, a state-level mask mandate, or both. And I just wanted to hear from you both. Is it possible that without mass mandates in those 97 counties, there could have been even more COVID cases than their word?

Statistically, that's something that we can't prove. So, I mean, the honest answer is yes. But, you know, what we do know is that the largest surging cases that we've seen now in that period around Thanksgiving through December, larger than even the previous surges, really. did take place in places where there were mask mandates. So could it have been worse? Yes. But, I mean, it was really bad. So, you know, all we can do is say, you know, is look at what the data definitely tells us. And the data definitely tells us that those surges were worse

than they were in some of the same places after the mandates were in place. than they were before. And the total number was much worse than what we had seen in the past, even though we had the mandates. And just to emphasize, again, we're very clear in the paper.

We're not saying don't wear masks. Right. Don't do any good. We think they do. But the problem is that public health policy has almost become obsessed with masks. And what we do know about them is precisely what Norbert pointed out that whatever value they have, they didn't prevent the biggest run-up of

cases that we've seen since the beginning of the pandemic. And that's not just true of the United States. Right. That's also true of throughout Europe, certainly. We cite Italy as an example, but Italy is only one example. Universally, mask wearing for whatever value it had. And we encourage people who wear masks. If we have our policy needs to go further than that in order to suppress the pandemic.

Doug's right. And if I could just tail off at one point that Doug mentioned there, that's, you know, in terms of the public policy part of this, you know, it's clear both with lockdowns and mask mandates and not just in the US that relying on those two things, locking everything down and implementing a mask mandate, it's clear that those two things have not prevented these surges. You know, you can get into the details over whether they do any good or not, but that's almost irrelevant. You know, I mean, you can look at L.A. County, Los Angeles area versus Florida. Los Angeles has some of the most severe restrictions in the U.S. Florida does not.

It's worse in Los Angeles than it is in Florida. But even aside from that, if you just look at what works and what doesn't work, You know, we can pretty definitively say now that this strategy that relies just on lockdowns and mask mandates has not prevented these surges. So on that note, Doug, what does your data mean for personal behavior? Should we wear a mask when it's not mandated? Like when we're around friends or family indoors? And what about wearing a mask outdoors? Yeah, I don't want to go into issues that I think I would listen to your local.

public health officials. I would talk to your doctor if you have a question about that. Mask wearing, you can definitely, definitely has value. But, you know, where you should wear them and whether it's appropriate to do so indoors. And frankly, in some cases, your doctor may say that, you know, if you have certain gatherings of people, you should avoid them entirely and not rely on ask to protect you. What I'd really like to focus on is when we talk about the fact that we haven't implemented policies that do work. I'd like to talk just for a couple of minutes if it's okay about what those policies might look like. Yeah, go for it. I would love to hear that was one of my follow-up questions, but yeah, feel free to bring that up now. Yeah, I mean, as I said,

what we focused on is saying, let's take steps like mask wearing and distancing and so forth to prevent the spread of the infection. And what we know now, I think, or should know by now, is that we can slow the rate perhaps at which the infection spreads, but the infection continues to spread. And unfortunately, it has spread at an unacceptably high rate. So what's the other side of the coin? If you know the people are going to get infected anyway, you need a strategy to say, well, what do we do once people get infected? Since we can't stop those infections, we can only slow them, what do we do when that happens? And again, the most important thing we can do is a better job of identifying people that have

the infections. And that's where we get into the issue of testing. Right now, we're testing somewhere between a million and a half and two million people a day. And when I say that, what I mean is we get test results back as to whether they're positive or negative. And that's how we understand how many daily new cases we have of confirmed COVID. Now, those test results were performed on people who were tested two, three, four, sometimes more days before. So we're not getting a lot of data, a million and a half and two million a day. in a nation of 330 million people is really not much.

And we're not getting timely data on those folks. And so one of the things that we've talked about, and Heritage did a symposium with Dr. Paul Romer, a Nobel-winning economist, Michael Minna, an epidemiologist Harvard, and I also participated in that, in which we talked about rapid self-testing These are tests that cost about a dollar to produce.

They're very simple tests involving either a swab or a bit of saliva. You do it yourself, you do it at home, you get the results in 15 minutes. And unfortunately, the FDA has not approved these for public use. We believe very strongly, and Norbert and I argue for this in the paper, that the FDA should allow these tests to be made available to people so that we can find out our COVID status, not in two or three or four days after it comes back from a laboratory, but we can find out within 15 to 30 minutes in our homes and take appropriate steps once we know what our infection status is. Well, Doug and Norbert, what is the best way as we go forward?

to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes, the elderly, as well as those with pre-existing conditions? Well, I think the rapid testing is part of that, has to be part of that strategy. I mean, this is, at the core, what this means is that we're empowering people and giving them the information that they need to protect themselves, as opposed to preventing them from having that. You know, if you, you know, look at nursing homes, you know, what happens? Well, you have a congregate setting where a bunch of people are living and you have a staff that comes in and out.

Well, obviously, even if you cordon off the residents, unless you keep the staff away from them, you know, that's a source of bringing the virus in. So what do you do? Well, you rapidly test people. I mean, that's, you know, the staff coming in and out, right? But without having the approval of the tests and having enough of those tests produced, which isn't going to come without the approval, you know, you can't do that. And you prevent people from having some people from having the information that they need.

You have a staff member who could test themselves before they leave their home. And if they test positive, they could stay home. I mean, like, that's that's a common sense part of, how we need to combat this stuff. Well, lastly, Doug, something that is suggested in your paper is establishing voluntary isolation facilities saying that they should be strictly voluntary. And I wanted to hear from you is how you think this should be gone about making it, you know, strictly voluntary, especially in today's day and age where there have been so many

mandates that have come down during this time. Yeah, that's, it's very important, the voluntary nature of the, things. When you think about what happens, we all kind of walk around with our masks and distancing and so forth, hoping that we don't get infected or infect somebody else. But then once we find out that somebody's infected, we tell them to go lock themselves in their house with their family members for 10 days or 14 days, whatever that is. And so what happens is one of the principal ways COVID is transmitted is in the home. So you want to give people a safe alternative. And I would at least say with respect to people who have a vulnerable person in their home, an older relative,

someone who might have or someone who might have a respiratory illness or something. If I get that, give me an alternative to locking myself in the house with that person and trying not to infect him or her. So it should be voluntary. And it should be something where if you agree to stay until you're clear to the infection, I think the government ought to compensate you for doing that. We're mailing out checks to people indiscriminately. It would be, if we're going to direct resources appropriately, we want to direct into people who are infected, because here's the thing. We go to great lengths through mask wearing and so forth to prevent the infections from occurring. But then somebody gets it.

That person, you want to make that infection a dead end. You want to make sure that person doesn't infect others. We know what happens when you send that person home. Typically, other people in the household get infected. Let's create some alternatives to allow that person to recover from the infection. without putting other people at risk. Well, Doug and Norbert, thank you so much for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast.

It's great having you with us. Thanks, Rachel. Thank you, Rachel. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeart Radio. Please be sure to leave us through a review

and a five-star rating on Apple Podcast and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening. and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.