This piece by the LA Times looks at mask compliance in three neighborhoods in southern California. The most compliant of the happens to be a neighborhood very close to me. And it’s not that great, which I can attest to from my own forays out to get some exercise every day:
To reduce the spread of the coronavirus, all Californians are required to wear a mask in crowded outdoor spaces. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor under an order issued in June by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Enforcement has been lax, and many people have resisted. It’s unknown how widely the public adheres to the rule, so The Times decided to find out.
Last month, over the course of a week, our reporters observed passersby in three locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Each person’s compliance with the mask order was classified into one of these three categories:
Correct
Wearing a mask that covers both the nose and mouth.
Incorrect
Wearing a mask that fails to cover both the nose and mouth.
No mask
Not wearing a mask at all.
We visited a trendy Venice shopping district, Main Street in Huntington Beach, and a leafy public park in north Long Beach. We monitored each location six times between July 23 and July 28, tracking a total of 3,026 passersby in two-hour shifts.
While our results are limited to a small selection of locations in the populous and diverse region of Southern California, it is modeled on studies conducted by academics to offer a more scientific answer to the question of how residents are responding to the pandemic. Here’s what we found.
Only 42% of the people we tracked were wearing masks correctly, 10% were wearing masks incorrectly and 47% were not wearing masks at all.
These results are in contrast with recent polls where, when asked by researchers, large majorities said that they wear masks in public always or very often. A recent survey by USC found that most Americans say they believe mask-wearing is important and can slow the spread of the virus. Unlike The Times, those studies did not directly observe the behavior of people in public, but instead were limited to asking questions online and over the telephone.
We found different results at different locations. In Venice, nearly 60% of people were wearing a mask correctly.
Forty miles south in Huntington Beach, less than 30% of people were wearing a mask.
Long Beach fell in between, with 40% of people wearing a mask.
Huntington Beach is in Orange Country which is the most conservative of the three neighborhoods they observed. But plenty of people
Far too many Americans just cannot or will not, for whatever reason, do this one simple thing. And it is one of the main reasons why people are dying from COVID in large numbers every day in this country. I will never understand this kind of nonsense:
And for every one like him, there are 20 who don’t have a tantrum but just refuse to wear one and spread it around. Why?