With the media pushing the next round of panic-inducing news about the spread of the Omicron variant (38 total cases in New York so far and no deaths), politicians in blue states are rushing to bring back face mask mandates, just as people prepare to gather for the holidays. But not everyone is on board with the idea. The Boston Globe reports today that there is something of a standoff taking place in Massachusetts. Many elected Democrats are clamoring for their state to impose similar restrictions, but Republican Governor Charlie Baker has already said that he’s not going to go there. The funny thing about the coverage in the Globe that caught my attention was the title of their article. “As pressure mounts for a new statewide mask mandate, experts are divided on whether such requirements work.” Really? I would expect some news like that to pop up in more conservative outlets, but to see such a statement in blue Massachusetts media came as a bit of a surprise. Reading further into the coverage, however, what the “experts” are “divided” over probably isn’t what you might assume.

Amid growing calls for a statewide mask mandate to blunt surging COVID-19 cases and rising hospitalizations, more communities are starting to take action.

Several, including Georgetown, Lowell, Chelsea, and Salem, have in the past two weeks reimposed mask rules for indoor public spaces…

But Governor Charlie Baker has resisted those calls, reiterating on Monday that he had no plans for a statewide mask mandate, noting that 5 million residents in Massachusetts are fully vaccinated and 1.5 million of those have booster shots.

The report cites medical organizations including the Massachusetts Medical Society as calling for a statewide mask mandate. The only expert they cite in opposition, at least in the introductory paragraphs, is the Governor. Later in the article, they get down to the actual medical authorities on the other side of the debate, but they aren’t claiming that mask mandates don’t hinder the spread of the disease. They’re simply saying that their studies show that most people are burned out on all of these COVID mitigation measures and a mandate isn’t likely to make many of them comply. The only real driver they found for greater compliance was local news outlets reporting sharp spikes in infections in the local regions where people live.

They quote John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. He was one of the authors of a study earlier this year that found that communities with high rates of mask usage did experience lower rates of transmission. But it wasn’t because of a government mandate. He said that “mask-wearing goes up when there is a threat other than a government mandate.” The real threats that make people change their behavior are rising numbers of hospitalizations and deaths in their own communities.

Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, blames the government’s insistence on keeping mandates in place when the pandemic was waning over the summer. The government has burnt through people’s tolerance for these rules when they might have been more willing to participate if they’d been given a few months of relief over the summer.

“We’ve taken the power of this tool out of our arsenal by failing to roll it back at the appropriate time, so that we could put it back in place at an appropriate time,” he said. “The public is largely frustrated by that messaging — when they knew it was low risk at certain times, yet the public health messaging stayed on code red.”

Instead, public policy should focus on vaccinations, boosters, and testing, he said.

As usual, the Globe focuses solely on the opinions of medical officials who argue without reservation that mask mandates work. This ignores the studies we’ve seen out of Denmark, Sweden and other locations that concluded that surgical masks can be quite effective, but the cloth masks that most people wear offer little to no protection to the wearer. But nobody in most of the American media wants to talk about that.

In terms of the compliance levels being cited above and the public’s lack of tolerance and trust in those issuing the mandates, we are certainly seeing plenty of data supporting that idea. Fully one-quarter of New York counties have now declared that they will not be “the mask police” and will not enforce the Governor’s new face mask mandate that went into effect on Monday. Other states are simply refusing to issue new mandates at all, leaving it up to individual communities to decide how best to handle it. And you’re going to be seeing a lot more of that as we move forward, I assure you.