LA county now requires anyone entering an essential business to wear a mask.
but i routinely see people with masks and gloves on while walking outside. not shopping, or going to shop, just walking. it's so odd, and frankly, wasteful.
I think I disagree.
It seems that face masks are quite effective in reducing the spread of illness. For example, look at the numbers in South Korea, Japan, etc. (where mask-wearing is common) compared to ours. Masks don't need to do 100% of the job -- rather, we would hope that in combination with moderate social distancing, better hygiene, improved testing, etc. we could reduce the rate of transmission. If each infected person spreads the illness to an average of only 0.9 others, then it won't do much more damage.
Now, from an economic angle, the US government just passed a $2 trillion stimulus package, which works out to about $6,000 per American. There are calls to spend much more money. Suppose we spend 5% of this on face masks, so $300 per American.
Currently, face masks can be bought at $20 for a box of 50 on Amazon. That gets 750 face masks to every American, at a cost that is cheap relative to the other costs of Covid-19.
And this is ignoring economies of scale. If the government decided to distribute free face masks in every school, every restaurant, in every theater, etc., then it could produce them at much cheaper than 40 cents each.
All in all, it seems like a potentially good investment.
it's a virus that rides on tiny masses of water to hopefully jump into the nasopharyngeal cavity of the next host. if it doesn't make it to those warm and juicy brachiae, it exponentially decays to the elements in hours. relative to air, those virus-laden water masses are heavy. most fall at your feet. some fly a few feet. very few make it many feet.
then imagine your chances of making a full-court basket (94 feet, 9.4" diameter ball in 18" hoop) and then divide those odds by the several orders of magnitude smaller that viruses are relative to us.
wearing masks (or gloves) outside makes no sense. you might as well walk around with your own lightning rod too then.
emergency personnel, medical professionals, and essential business workers should wear masks because they are at elevated, face-to-face risk.
This is an extremely strong statement. Although it might be plausibly true, my impression is that the transmission of the disease isn't well enough understood to make such assertions with confidence.
Can you cite a reference for your claim?
I think it is agreed that physical distancing alone while inside of closed spaces with strangers is an extremely good idea. Wearing masks is, potentially, also an extremely good idea.
Shouldn't we adopt any and all measures that have the potential (not certainty; potential is enough) to substantially cut down on Covid-19 transmission, and whose economic and other costs are comparatively modest? Even if we later determine that only one of these measures was really necessary, I doubt that we'll regret our efforts.
There seems to be a huge difference in the trajectory of cases in Japan, vs South Korea, so I don't know what you think you're saying, if you group them together. In South Korea, cases went up and then apparently flattened out almost completely. In Japan, the graph I saw has been lower than in other places but is, almost uniquely, not flattening so far, even in the way that Italy or the US has.
So it makes no sense to me to combine them and say "look, that is the example". If one is the example, the other most likely isn't.
Putting on a mask takes a few seconds, so compared to all the suffering it might prevent, even at 0.01% probability, it's well worth it.
risks differ with context.
A plausible rule of thumb seems to be: if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke, you could inhale their viruses. I certainly smell smoke from smokers I pass on the street.
but here's some additional intuition:
1. it's true that virus particles are roughly the same size as smoke particles, but infected people exhale virus "pucks" that are agglomerations of multiple viruses and water, leading them to fall while smoke floats (giving us the 3-6 foot rule, per prior coronavirus studies).
2. a single virus particle in the air without water could float around but is overwhelmingly likely to fall apart quickly. the air doesn't provide the countervailing forces to keep it together, and the bombardment of energies from all around also pull it apart.
3. the fact that a homemade mask allows smoke right through but filters out some portion of the virus pucks (as per your prior link) is evidence in itself of the differential affinities of smoke and virus pucks.
but let's face it, most people wearing masks (outside) do it because they think it's protecting them from the filthy other people. however, if you're sick, all you're doing is concentrating the virus pucks in one place right in front of a face we'll each touch 30 times an hour. no lay person consistently observes the contamination rules that hospital personnel do, especially when infection rates are <0.1% and failure to do so has no obvious downsides. masks could in fact be more dangerous because of a false sense of security.