wunderforce

I think there is some evidence that lockdowns at least offered partial mitigation, but my memory is fuzzy on that. They certainly didn't stop transmission but they may have blunted the rate a bit.

I also looked into the mask literature when the pandemic first started and agree there is no evidence to support their effectiveness (unless they are N95s). Even the meta-analysis published by the WHO stated there was no evidence for their effectiveness but tentatively recommend their use as the cost of mask usage was low.

I will add that most of the studies had healthcare workers wearing masks, and did not test the combination of both parties wearing masks. It is entirely possible that everyone wearing masks + distancing + limited contact duration may be "effective". In this case it's less about being actually protected (N95) and more about lowering the probability of transmission events, which our common leaky/crappy masks may be able to accomplish under the aforementioned conditions.

I doubt(/hope) no one believes that if I take a healthy and infected person, give them both surgical masks, and lock them in a small room together for a few hours, that the masks will prevent the healthy person from contracting covid.

A lot of your observations make sense. My speculation would be:

A) Japan has a more temperate climate

B) Japan is an island and was pretty strict about locking down travel and forcing everyone entering the country to quarantine for 14 days

C) Japanese culture seems to promote very rigid adherence to rules and proper social etiquette.

Africa: Hot climate, poor testing, data likely not accurate

Australia: Island, hot climate, pretty heavy travel/quarantine restrictions

New Zealand: Island, rural with very dispersed population, heavily restricted international travel

People may argue that the UK is also an island but fared much worse. To that I would say 1) Much colder climate 2) did not heavily restrict travel like AUS and NZ did.

It's out there. It's also not hard to take raw data and divide by the population size which is publicly available for all counties and cities.

At least one study was done in Florida comparing counties that had mask mandates vs those that did not. The general conclusion matches your observation, mask mandates did not appear to have a material effect on any covid related metrics (infections, hospitalizations, deaths, ect.)

This is a bit nuanced because lots of people wore masks without a mandate, but it is also true that many people are pretty anti mask and definitely won't wear one if not forced to.

From my perspective it is pretty clear that masks did not have a large enough protective effect to show up in aggregate data.

As far as lockdowns go, they work until you end them, at which point you have just delayed the inevitable.

If you want to look at the data yourself, I would highly recommend the following site run by a prof at University of Illinois (use the population normalized graphs): http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

Having a hard time finding the primary study I mentioned but I have provided links with some (population normalized) data below.

Florida counties (scroll down to second graph near the bottom for the start of the discussion): https://rationalground.com/after-nine-months-we-still-know-m...

Various graphs showing infection rate pre and post mask mandate: https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/

More mask graphs, mostly US states: https://rationalground.com/post-thanksgiving-mask-charts-sti...