Pottinger felt sure he had the data on his side. He argued that whenever a large majority of people wore masks, it stopped contagion “dead in its tracks.” He pointed to the success in Taiwan, which was manufacturing ten million masks per day for a population of twenty-three million. It was almost untouched. Hong Kong was one of the most densely populated cities in the world, but there was no community spread of virus because nearly everyone wore masks.
