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Study: Hundreds of lives saved in Kansas counties that adopted mask mandates
LAWRENCE — Despite facing cultural and political pushback, the evidence remains clear: Face masks made a difference in Kansas. “These had a huge effect in counties that had a mask mandate,” said Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas and author of a new study appearing in JAMA Network Open, a journal published by the American Medical Association. “Our research found that masks reduced cases, hospitalizations and deaths in counties that adopted them by around 60% across the board.”
Publication amplifies Chinese migrant workers’ voices
LAWRENCE – Literary works by an overlooked, even exploited, group of Chinese citizens are reaching an even broader audience as a result of a special section in the Spring 2021 edition of World Literature Today, co-edited by Hui “Faye” Xiao, professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Kansas. The section includes essays and poems composed by migrant workers and several scholarly articles discussing the literary and social significance of their creative work.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Study: Hundreds of lives saved in Kansas counties that adopted mask mandates
LAWRENCE — Despite facing cultural and political pushback, the evidence remains clear: Face masks made a difference in Kansas.
“These had a huge effect in counties that had a mask mandate,” said Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas. “Our research found that masks reduced cases, hospitalizations and deaths in counties that adopted them by around 60% across the board.”
Ginther’s article “Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Rates, Hospitalizations and Deaths in Kansas” examines the effect of masks on the state’s 105 counties. It appears in JAMA Network Open, a journal published by the American Medical Association.
Kansas boasts the fifth-highest total of counties among all the states. Executive Order No. 20-52 that took effect in July of 2020 was initially adopted by only 15 counties, with 68 others not adopting the order through October. A second mandate in November was embraced by an additional 40 counties.
“We thought masks would matter for certain cases, but the effect size for hospitalizations and deaths being the same rate was pretty astonishing,” Ginther said.
Co-written with Carlos Zambrana, an associate researcher at the Institute for Policy & Social Research, Ginther estimated masks saved about 500 lives in adoptive counties. And, yet, other counties often refused to adopt the mandate, citing personal freedoms and lack of scientific evidence as reasons.
“There’s no way to run a clinical trial on masks because you’d have to observe people using them all the time, and we can’t observe everyone’s behavior. This type of observational study is the best we can do,” Ginther said.
“But in terms of personal freedom, I would say that wearing a mask is a public good. There’s a negative externality to not wearing one, and you could get infected or infect others. In a pandemic, where close to 600,000 people have died, this is a low-cost preventative measure that preserves life.”
Data for her study was corralled from several sources. She used the daily total number of cases per county from The New York Times COVID-19 data in the U.S. GitHub repository.
The state information came from the list of county official actions compiled by the Kansas Health Institute. Linear regression difference-in-difference models were then employed, with cases regressed on an indicator variable that started 21 days after the mandate to allow for changes in mask-wearing behavior, an indicator for no coronavirus cases and the number of days since the first recorded case.
“We are required to wear seatbelts in the state to save lives. We get driver’s licenses to save lives. We have vaccine mandates for children going to school to prevent the spread of infectious disease. These are all public health measures that we follow. At some point, the government steps in and says, ‘These are the right things to do to save lives,’” she said.
Aside from the health implications of ignoring a mask mandate, there are also economic ones.
“COVID-19 costs money,” she said. “It slows down economic activity. It drains money for hospitalizations. We show that if you prevent COVID, you save the health care system money.”
Now in her 18th year at KU, Ginther believes “Association of Mask Mandates” demonstrates the importance of nonmedical interventions for preventing the spread of respiratory diseases.
She said, “Given everything that’s happening around the world, this may not be the last pandemic in our lifetime. Just think about places like India that don’t have access to the vaccine. If you’re wanting to slow the spread, knowing that a mask works and is a cost-effective approach to public health is really important.”
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Publication amplifies Chinese migrant workers’ voices
LAWRENCE – Do you ever wonder about the lives of the people who make your consumer goods half a world away in China?
After all, the lives of people on the other side of the tracks, or even the upstairs-downstairs social split within the same household, are traditionally rich fodder for literature.
So it’s not surprising that the experiences of a huge new class of migrant workers are of interest to their fellow Chinese, whose lives in central Beijing are much different than the lives of those who come from the countryside seeking the bright lights of town, but who can never penetrate the mega-city’s outer belt road.
Now writings by this overlooked, even exploited, group are reaching an even broader audience as a result of a special section in the Spring 2021 edition of World Literature Today, co-edited by Hui “Faye” Xiao, professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Kansas. This special section includes a set of essays and poems composed by migrant workers and several scholarly articles discussing the literary and social significance of their creative writings.
Xiao’s own article focuses on an essay by one of the so-called “new workers,” in this case a nanny for an upper-class family. Xiao writes of how this nanny’s autobiographical essay, “I Am Fan Yusu,” went viral in a particularly Chinese way in 2017, going from a WeChat social media phenomenon to wide coverage in the mainstream media, resonating with millions of readers.
“I Am Fan Yusu” was co-translated into English for the special journal section by Philip Bradshaw and Keegan Sparks, two undergraduate students who studied Chinese language and literature at KU.
A former schoolteacher from rural China who moved to the big city to work in her employer’s home, leaving her own child behind, Fan Yusu’s “life trajectory is typical of hundreds of millions of women migrant workers from rural China,” Xiao wrote.
Male migrant workers typically perform the “dirty and poorly paid and dangerous jobs — construction workers and transportation and delivery,” Xiao said.
Women often “work as waitresses or cashiers at the supermarket, and then domestic workers,” Xiao said. “The traditional name is nanny, but the more formal name for that type of worker is now domestic worker or domestic helper.”
But even if they labor for years in one of China’s major cities, these new workers usually don’t qualify for the benefits – education, health care, pension – that urban residents born in the city do. They are held back by virtue of their ongoing rural household classification, leading to second-class citizenship.
Xiao began trying to bring these stories to light a couple of years ago, working with a writers’ group in the outer Beijing suburb of Picun. A handful of the stories in the new journal edition come from there.
“They’re so important to your everyday lives, yet they seem to remain invisible and silent,” Xiao said. “We don’t really hear much about their own voices, their own narratives, their perspectives and their concerns, and particularly for domestic workers in this new trend of care work. Not only do they produce very concrete commodities like iPhones we’re using every day, but they also they provide care … for your family members. So that means the nature of their work is emotional. But on the other hand, their own emotional needs, their own concerns, their own stories and everyday struggles are brushed away and neglected, considered something trivial or insignificant.
“So I saw this as not only social and economic inequality, but also cultural inequality, because they lacked access to the system as a representation to tell their own stories, not only to their employers but also to fellow workers so that they can form a sense of community, a sense of belonging — coming together through writings and through storytelling.
“So that is why I want to remedy the situation. I want to … have their stories told, not only within China — because a lot of Chinese readers already can have access to their stories — but also to bring their voices to the English-speaking world. I hope some American workers can get inspiration by reading their stories and pick up a pen to start writing their own stories, to form this kind of transnational literary network.”
Such a network is already taking shape: New Workers Literature, a grassroots literary bimonthly edited by the Picun worker writers, has also published translated poems and essays by migrant workers in the United States, Italy, Egypt and other parts of the world.
Currently, Xiao is editing a special section on female domestic workers’ writings for the journal Chinese Literature Today to further explore the cultural and socioeconomic inequalities at the intersection of gender and class.
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