Early in July the Kansas governor signed an order to make masks mandatory throughout the state in indoor businesses. But the republican legislature had taken action to strip her of the powers she needed to make such emergency orders.
As a result the mask order was not heeded in most counties. But some counties did implement the mask mandate. About a week ago, the Kansas health department presented data showing the outcomes in counties that did implement a mask order vs those that did not. The red line represents the case counts of (7 day MA) of counties that ignored the mask mandate. The blue line shows the count for counties that implemented the mask mandate. The count is normalized for population.
July 3 was the date the governor issued the mandate. July 17 is the date where you would expect to start seeing results.
As you can see, counties with mandatory masks (blue) have maintained a relatively steady case count. more or less just moving sideways on the graph.
Whereas counties with no mask mandate (red) continued to grow in number of cases. And even though they started with fewer cases than the blue line counties, they are have now surpassed them at an ever increasing rate.
Kansas.png
https://ipsr.ku.edu/covid19/images/M...te_forJoCo.pdf
Masks work. Spread the word. Not the virus.
Wear one. Encourage others to wear one. Save lives.