Political polarisation impedes the public policy response to COVID-19
Nicolas Ajzenman, Tiago Cavalcanti, Daniel Da Mata Wearing face masks should be considered the least controversial of major public responses to COVID-19. Unlike with many other measures such as shelter-in-place ordinances, lockdowns, or capacity restrictions, there is no trade-off between mask use and economic activity. Several recent studies documented that masks can effectively diminish the spread of a viral respiratory infection (Mitze et al. 2020, Fischer et al. 2020, Chu et al. 2020, Leung et al. 2020), without disrupting economic activity (Howard et al. 2020). By contrast, social dista...
Source: voxeu.org