No, the one from Jena was a controlled study, and they tried to exclude any biases like neighboring cities. It’s “synthetic” because you can’t create two equal cities and population to test, unfortunately.

Again, did you actually open and read the link? It’s pointless to discuss your feelings in place of the studies. You’re dismissing all of the data in that report based on.. what? Again, the increase in total cases tells you nothing about the efficacy of the measures. The controlled study does that.

Studies like these can be invalidated by further studies, or systematic reviews. They are not invalidated by popular feelings over news reports. Show me one of those statistically-backed rebuttals and I’ll believe you.

(The WaPo link was posted by yourself, most of those are self-reported. It’s good that you notice because it also weakens your own argument if you think about it)