[Mr Rogers]

“You can’t compare California now to California shut down in April.”

I’m comparing California in JUNE - when they issued a statewide mask requirement - to California in JULY. 30+ days later. Cases have increased 3 fold even after a mask requirement plus additional business restrictions. So if masks work, why are cases skyrocketing? It should only take 10 days tops for CASES to start declining if you implement effective controls.

“But mainly because they are testing more”

Odd. When people argue against masks and say the spikes are due to more testing, they are ridiculed. But if someone points out cases continue to skyrocket after masks are required....cases are due to testing?

You cannot have it both ways. If cases are not increasing, then why impose masks? If cases ARE increasing, then masks are not working.

You want a scenario where no objective reality is allowed in affect your claims. If cases were falling, you would claim masks did it. If they skyrocket, you claim they would go up even faster without the masks.

It is like global warming - no matter what the data, proponents get to claim it is happening!

[palmer]

The increase in testing is a simple fact, doesn't matter what other people say about testing,. You've evidently want to propagate a red herring that masks work well. Well that's a red herring. They work marginally well.

Whether mask orders work in large diverse publics like California's remains to be seen. There is evidence that in some cases they are worse than nothing (see intermittent mask use studied in Al Asmary). There is evidence that dorm mask use decreased infections but not by a lot (see the other study I just linked in my profile). I think the data you are presenting has too many confounding factors be useful. For example even after masks were mandatory on June 18th, people went to bars until July 1st. So those people could certainly pick up the virus sans mask.