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Originally Posted by jimjamuser
It is hard to prove a negative, but for all we know shutting down various things and requiring masks MAY HAVE save 200,000 Americans. It certainly saved some.
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Maybe. The usual paper masks probably did next to nothing.
There was an episode of the Netflix series "The Crown" in which smog was actually killing people in about 1953. The British government essentially declared a "mask mandate" for its citizens. In one scene, a member of the cabinet came into a meeting wearing a mask, and the prime minister told him "Take that ridiculous thing off, it does nothing---we only told the people to wear one so it looked like we were doing something about the smog"
Shutting things down probably had an indirect beneficial effect. The most effective mitigation of the pandemic prior to vaccines was social distancing of 6 feet or more---a closed venue accomplishes that, although with some overkill and deleterious economic impacts.
Hard to pin down a number of "lives saved" by these measures----after all, we have no idea of how many people died
of Covid as opposed to
with Covid.