Originally Posted by
TravelingZoomer
Your "great news" is hardly a guarantee, does not appear to be peer reviewed and has more exclusions, limitations and conditions than the average insurance policy.
We are unable to measure facial cover use in the community (i.e. compliance with the mandate). As such, the estimates represent the intent-to-treat effects of these mandates, i.e. their effects as passed, and not the individual-level effect of wearing a face mask in public on own COVID-19 risk. Related, we do not measure enforcement of the mandates, which might affect compliance. We also do not have data on county-level mandates for wearing public-face masks. In some states without state-level mandates such as California,22 Texas,23 and Colorado,24 multiple counties have enacted such mandates. These county-level mandates do not bias the intent-to-treat estimates of effects of state-level mandates as actually passed, but they do add local-level heterogeneity not directly accounted for in the model. We do examine the robustness of estimates to excluding some of these states. Finally, we are able to examine only confirmed COVID-19 cases. However, there is evidence of a higher infection rate in the community than confirmed cases.