On February 12, Governor Gianforte lifted Montana’s mask mandate. Now each individual county would decide what was best for them.
Six days later, Ravalli County announced that they wouldn’t require their residents and visitors to wear masks.
The county has about 45,000 people, with the largest city being Hamilton, population 5,000 or so.
47 miles to the south is Missoula, a city with 75,000 people in a county with 120,000 people.
On the day Gianforte lifted the statewide mandate, Missoula made it a point to say they’d be enforcing the mask mandate well into the future.
So now, nearly two months later, what are the results?
These two graphs show you the Covid numbers for both Missoula and Ravalli counties over the past month.
- Two days ago, Missoula had 14 active Covid cases. Ravalli had 8.
- The seven-day average for Missoula was 16, for Ravalli it was 5.
- Missoula has been averaging 20 cases a day for the past three weeks, while Ravalli has averaged fewer than 10.
How do you explain this?
- I think one of the most obvious answers is that Ravalli has such a lower population than Missoula, so lower Covid numbers.
- Another possibility is that Missoula tends to have a younger population, and perhaps they’re not social-distancing as much, therefore infecting each other.
- Also, Missoula has more older residents than Ravalli, so it only makes sense we’ll see more infections...again, based on population.
One thing that we can be sure of are the masks. Certainly Missoula isn’t experiencing higher Covid numbers because they’re still masked up, right?
That goes against everything we’ve been told, against all the science!
And that puts reasonable people in a bind. For if masks were so effective at stopping the spread of the virus, then why is a masked county like Missoula experiencing more daily infections than an unmasked county like Ravalli?
To take it a bit further, how is a masked and still-closed-down state like California compare to an open, maskless state like Florida?
In California, they have a lot fewer infections, but a lot more deaths. That state had over 2,000 cases each day for the last few weeks of March, and around 200 deaths each day. In Florida, cases each day for the same period were over 4,000 a day but deaths were fewer than 100 each day.
Why is it that Florida has more people infected, but fewer people dying?
Personally, I think Florida is getting closer to herd immunity, so when people do get infected, they can handle it better and fight it off. Perhaps these people are often younger that are getting it, maybe they’re told to get the tests so they can work.
On the other hand, perhaps in California they don’t have as much herd immunity, so when someone does get it, they can’t fight it off as much. Maybe these are older people that have been cooped-up all year and when they do encounter another human again, their body can’t take it.
I don’t know.
One thing I do know is that places like California and Missoula will keep their mask mandates in effect as long as they can. They’ll keep them forever, if no one challenges them over it.
More and more, wearing a mask isn’t so much about health and safety so much as it’s about control, with egomaniacal individuals in positions of power abusing that power so they can feel more important and better than the people they ‘lord over.’
If you challenge their dictates, they’ll respond with passive-aggressive attacks meant to browbeat you into submission. If that doesn’t work, they’ll play the race or gender card. If that still doesn’t convince you, they’ll just cancel you and ignore you afterward, pretending you don’t exist, never had.
These aren’t Democrats, anymore. They’re not liberals, either.
We’re dealing with psychopaths.