Originally Posted by GUWonder

The people responding to the survey are either not being entirely accurate about their habits in Sweden or they are not anywhere close to fully representative of the behavior of the people going out and about in public across Sweden. The proportion of masked passengers at peak times at the biggest public transit stations outside of Stockholm in March was well less than 10%. The proportion of masked customers at the 3 big Swedish malls in March beyond Stockholm during the peak parking lot occupancy times was also well under 10% in most of March. Even in Stockholm, the majority haven't seemed to be wearing masks in March. The lead up to the March infection spike did follow the drop in mask use in 2021 to a level below what was happening in a small part of late 2020.

People may tend to hyper-inflate how frequently and/or for how long they are wearing masks. When I was asking for activity-based metrics at one place where I wanted a lot more productivity for my buck, the gap between the information supplied by respondents to the survey about how often and how much time they spend on specified activities on the job was very different than what actual live activity recording time data ended up showing. People usually seem more capable to relatively accurately determine if they are doing something more frequently now than before but they struggle with self-reporting accurately about the scale of a noticed change in their own activities.