Why Statistical evidence is always stronger than scientific opinion...

Even as I post this, some scientist somewhere has a new experiment they claim proves masks work! But proof is never in opinion and always in the data!

All scientific opinion starts out as a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an opinion based on limited evidence that generally needs further experimental and/or statistical evidence to prove that hypothesis and turn it into a working theory. There is no such thing as a Scientist who can just demand his opinions are working theories without adequate testing of said opinion. It's why scientists have labs, do experiments, and collect and analyse data.

We have never used masks to stop the spread of a virus. Regardless of how many different scientists opined that this was the end all be all to flattening the curve, the idea of masks technically has always been a hypothesis in need of long term statistical analysis to determine the validity of the claim. The idea that we had "settled science" on the subject from the onset is literally impossible based on how science works.

To be clear, two crash test dummies aiming large amounts of flem at each other from a two to three foot distance is not a valid scientific experiment to prove the hypothesis that masks stopped the spread of the virus. All it really proved is that mask wearing would prevent large amounts of flem from being sneezed from one person to another. Go figure. Didn't need an experiment to understand that. I guess if the virus was only spread by humans directly sneezing into the face of other humans at a distance of around 2-3 feet, then sure. Great experiment. If not, well then... 

So here we are, a couple years into the mask wearing experiment and as you can see we have a general sample of 31 states with mask mandates and 19 without.  Someone was kind enough to graph this out for our viewing pleasure and guess what? It doesn't appear that the differences between the two states added up to much difference at all. At times it looked like the masked states did slightly better and at times the reverse appears true. But the graphs peaks and valleys remain very coordinated between the two samples. 

Moreover, if you didn't know which line was which, could you have pointed out which was likely the states that wore masks and which was not? Certainly the orange line seemed to be slightly higher than the black line for more overall time, but when he black line was higher, it seemed significantly higher (almost as if it was "catching up" overall). Moreover, the highest overall peak of any time was the black line, by quite a bit. Would you have thought that masked states would have peaked at a higher rate than the unmasked?

So the statistical evidence is here. Not only that, but similar analysis from a world wide pool of mask wearing data confirms what we have seen here. No matter what any particular scientists (or even our own CDC) suggests, when you take ALL DATA from the entire pandemic and do the actual statistical comparison, there is little evidence that mask wearing did anything other than give liberals an excuse to shame people.