Only 40 nations have publicly-available data on COVID hospitalization stored at the OurWorldInData online data repository. The 44 nations with the most stringent requirements for mask use on 21 Aug 2021 were collected, along with the 14 nations which did not require them.
Cross-referencing these nations onto those with hospitalization data yielded only 5 total nations for comparison, two with stringent (absolute) mask requirements, and 3 without requirements. Of the 3 that didn’t require masks, Japan was removed because masks in Japan are popular.
A population-weighted average of those COVID hospitalized per million population was recorded for 52 weeks from 25 Aug 2021. Evidence suggests that mask mandates increase the number of people who are “COVID-hospitalized”:
A statistical test was performed on the 52-week averages, although one look at the graph reveals that it wasn’t needed. The COVID hospitalization in the 2 nations requiring masks was two-and-a-half times higher than in the 2 nations not requiring them:
[click to enlarge]
The one-tailed p-value in the orange cell means that, if masks actually didn’t put you into the hospital, then the chance to randomly find the stark contrast which was actually found here is only 3 chances in a million.
Evidence in these very small samples with publicly-available hospital data reveals that face masks do not protect against COVID. In fact, the evidence suggests that masks make it more likely that you will be “COVID-hospitalized.”
Reference
[level of mask mandates by country and by date] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-face-coverings
[COVID-hospitalized per million by country and by date] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-hospitalizations
[2021 population by country] — World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL