On November 19th, Sununu issued a statewide mask-mandate. The graph below from the New York Times shows the that number of COVID cases has since skyrocketed:
It bears noting that Sununu has repeatedly claimed that “the science” shows that “masks work”:
Well if masks “work”, we should have expected to see cases drop, not go up, right?
The mask-cultists’ response is to assert that the increase would have been much worse without a mask-mandate. While we can’t (and don’t have to) disprove their assertion (the burden is on them to prove the assertion), we can compare States with mask-mandates to States without mask-mandates.
The explosion in COVID cases in New Hampshire despite the mask mandate in not anomalous. There are no mask-mandate States that show a decrease in COVID cases over the same November-December time frame. What’s more and what completely undermines the claim that mask-mandates have a mitigating effect is that States WITHOUT mask-mandates report less of an increase in cases than States with mandates:
I suspect the non-mandate States fare better because people in the mandate States buy into the baloney that masks work and fail to take the precautions that they would normally take during the cold and flu months to avoid getting sick.
But whatever the reason, Sununu is either woefully ignorant or intentionally misleading when he tells us that “masks work.”
What is driving the spike in New Hampshire and elsewhere in COVID cases is that it is cold and flu season. COVID is a virus, as is the cold and the seasonal flu. When it gets cold and we shut the windows and spend more time indoors, we are more likely to get infected with a virus.
Of course, what will happen is that when the season change and the warm weather returns … and we open our windows and spend less time indoors … COVID will “go away” as it did this past summer. And as surely as spring follows winter, Sununu will rush to twitter, Instagram, WMUR and NHPR and claim all the credit.