“But,” charged the Sentinel, “the chart was consciously manipulated to produce that appearance by comparing the same data (cases per day) on different axes.”
“Cases for mandate counties are based on the left axis, with a range of 15 to 25, while those without mandates are based on a secondary axis on the right, with a scale of 4 to 14.”
The Sentinel replotted the data using the same vertical axis, yielding “results [that] look dramatically different.” Specifically, the blue line (non-masking counties) is consistently below the orange line (masking counties). In other words, the no-mask counties already have fewer cases than the mask counties, even after more than a month of masking.