94% of South Koreans wore Masks

Post #1082

Of all nations worldwide, South Korea is among the top — if not at the top — in wearing masks. South Koreans were 94% compliant with mask mandates:

And even when the mask mandates were lifted, the people of South Korea continued to wear masks often:

At the opposite end of the spectrum with regard to public use of masks would be Sweden, which never had a general mask mandate, and typical percentages of people wearing masks were around 10% to 15%. Though, if masks worked, then you’d expect less cases per million in South Korea compared to Sweden. But the opposite is true:

The masks in South Korea may have helped them to spread COVID, or it may have helped to reduce personal immunity by way of challenging the immune system with up to 3 times the typical bacterial concentration in the mouth, nose, and throat (prolonged mask use can super-concentrate bacterial counts in the mouth, nose, and throat).

Here is the time-series of cases per million in each of these two nations:

The end of March 2022 is when all of that mask use came back to haunt South Korea, though we cannot discount the fact that that is also the time when there had been a lot of uptake of COVID shots, which are suspected of fueling the pandemic by driving virual mutations and case counts up (negative efficacy).

That last point is the reason that you are never supposed to vaccinate “into” a pandemic. But that’s another story. The story here is that it is hard to believe that masks work, when the nation using the “most” masks ends up with 2.5 times as many cases per million as the nation using the “least” masks.

Reference

[94% compliance with mask mandates in South Korea] — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221242092200574X

[extensive mask use, even beyond the mandates] — https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/04/05/why/mask-mask-mandate-Korea/20230405070011220.html

[high and low mask users in 2020] — Badillo-Goicoechea E, Chang TH, Kim E, LaRocca S, Morris K, Deng X, Chiu S, Bradford A, Garcia A, Kern C, Cobb C, Kreuter F, Stuart EA. Global trends and predictors of face mask usage during the COVID-19 pandemic. BMC Public Health. 2021 Nov 15;21(1):2099. doi: 10.1186/s12889-021-12175-9. PMID: 34781917; PMCID: PMC8667772. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8667772/

[cumulative cases per million] — https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[time series of cases per million] — https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

[Extended mask use more than triples the concentration of bacteria on the inside of the mask] — Zhiqing L, Yongyun C, Wenxiang C, Mengning Y, Yuanqing M, Zhenan Z, Haishan W, Jie Z, Kerong D, Huiwu L, Fengxiang L, Zanjing Z. Surgical masks as source of bacterial contamination during operative procedures. J Orthop Translat. 2018 Jun 27;14:57-62. doi: 10.1016/j.jot.2018.06.002. PMID: 30035033; PMCID: PMC6037910. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6037910/

[Extended mask use more than triples the bacterial concentration on the face] — Marín-Nieto J, Reino-Perez C, Santillana-Cernuda G, Díaz-Bernal JM, Luque-Aranda R, García-Basterra I. FACE MASK CONTAMINATION DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIA. A STUDY ON PATIENTS RECEIVING INTRAVITREAL INJECTIONS. Retina. 2021 Nov 1;41(11):2215-2220. doi: 10.1097/IAE.0000000000003202. PMID: 33965993. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33965993/