THREAD: AN ANSWER EMERGES FROM THE ASK BELOW. As of yesterday, “more than 200 million Americans are under state-directed mandates to wear masks in public, or more than 60% of the country by population." This is a safe estimate.
Let me explain because this is #goodtwitter.
1/
The good people @alexandraphelan @nwnancy and teams at covidamp.org have been running state/local numbers and mandates for sometime. They took the masking policies and cross referenced with populations and got 60% for me. More on them here:
2/
For those who have been following along, this state by state approach is not great but it is all that we got. Just like closings, PPE, etc. the federal government is not mandating unified policies. So we get piecemeal efforts. 3/
I've been monitoring state by state move to masking (that mirrored process of closings in March) under the "one damn state at a time" mantra. Again, not ideal but not nothing. It looked like by mid-July we might see something like a national policy. 4/
We focus on the horrible states (looking at you Florida) but slowly but surely the population covered is getting there. This number is low as it doesn't include local ordinances in state's without mandates nor private or institutional (university, for example) rules. 5/
Again, not ideal this Articles of Confederation response. But not nothing. Thanks to the good efforts of numbers people, we now know that over 60% of the US population is covered. @TheAtlantic 6/
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
And this is why I like #goodtwitter. 7/7
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