I am a believer in science, and as such I want to get as much information as possible before making a judgement regarding masks. So I took the official statistics of coronavirus 19 cases and deaths for the 50 states and some territories for the seven day period between March 22 thru March 28, divided them up into states with mask mandates and states with no current mask mandates, totaled them up, and this is what I found:
The total death rate for states with mask mandates: 1.46%. The total death rate for states with no mask mandates: 2.02%. This seems to indicate that wearing masks reduce deaths by 28%.
The counter argument to this is that the State of California, one of the most restrictive state in the union had a death rate of 7.63%, while South Dakota, a state that never had a lockdown, nor a mask mandate had a death rate of 0.5%. This seems to indicate that not having a mask mandate is 15 times better.
Obviously the truth is somewhere in between, wearing masks may or may not improve the situation.
These are the U.S. states and territories with mask mandates:
Last seven days
California 2635 201 7.63%
Kentucky 600 29 4.83%
Arkansas 182 8 4.40%
Louisiana 349 14 4.01%
Alabama 419 16 3.82%
Nevada 281 9 3.20%
New Mexico 191 5 2.62%
Kansas 188 4 2.13%
Massachusetts 2123 36 1.70%
Utah 424 7 1.65%
North Carolina 1819 26| 1.43%
Indiana 848 11 1.30%
Ohio 1703 22 1.29%
New York 8171 102 1.25%
Hawaii 91 1 1.10%
Maryland 1146 12| 1.05%
Illinois 2281 23 1.01%
West Virginia 412 4 0.97%
New Hampshire 339 3 0.88%
Virginia 1506 12| 0.80%
Delaware 253 2 0.79%
Pennsylvania 4019 30 0.75%
District of Columbia 135 1 0.74%
New Jersey 4462 31 0.69%
Wisconsin 468 3 0.64%
Vermont 167 1 0.60%
Washington 1022 6 0.59%
Oregon 351 2 0.57%
Colorado 1132 6 0.53%
Maine 197 1 0.51%|
Michigan 4662 21 0.45%
Minnesota 1405 6 0.43%
Connecticut 1217 5 0.41%
American Samoa 0 0 0.00%
Total 45201 660 1.46%
These are the states and territories without mask mandates:
State Cases/day Deaths Death rate
Last seven days
Georgia 1434 58 4.04%
Arizona 547 20 3.66%
Texas 3359 100 2.98%
Montana 152 4 2.63%
Oklahoma 343 9 2.62%
Mississippi 252 6 2.38%
Nebraska 315 5 1.59%
Florida 5137 69 1.34%
South Carolina 1108 14 1.26%
Missouri 699 8 1.14%
Iowa 607 8 1.32%
Alaska 102 1 0.98%
Tennessee 1149 9 0.78%
North Dakota 134 1 0.75%
Idaho 287 2 0.70%
Wyoming 62 0.4 0.62%
South Dakota 200 1 0.50%
Total 15877 320 2.02%