Masks cannot end someone's life either on purpose or accidentally.
A better example is seat belts or government issued ID, which are already currently mandatory.
A better example is seat belts or government issued ID, which are already currently mandatory.
For what it’s worth, I think a mask order is reasonable.
Also, think of a man as underwear for your face. You can strut around your house naked all you want, but you can't walk down the street that way, and I'm fairly certain the grocery store can't unilaterally decide to be a nudist friendly operation either. If the Venn diagram of places where you can be legally naked and places you can not wear a mask were basically the same, the original commenter' version of "everywhere" would be sufficiently met.
Perhaps not in the US, but it's mandated in pretty much across all western society.
And the US's refusal to adopt a standard ID system also leads to pseudo-ID schemes and proxies such as social security numbers and driver's license.
> nor is seatbelt use on any private property.
That's a great example.because no one is requiring anyone to wear facemasks while they are in their own home. The key take should be that the goal of these measures is to mitigate the risk that a specific threat poses to the public. You are required to wear a seatbelt while driving in public roads because the risk of being involved in a traffic accident is relatively high. You are required to wear a face mask in public because the risk of transmitting the virus is relatively high. Once you cease to be in public then the risk you pose to others is negligible.
The ironic thing is that despite this widespread attitude, we have genuinely scary levels of mass surveillance.
We do have a standardized ID system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act
And I wear my seatbelt always when driving, though not necessarily if I am backing into a spot.
So even a common sense policy which saves many lives from a public health perspective has some clear limits to when and how we enforce it as part of the overall social contract.
Particularly with regard potentially discriminatory police actions which can be non-uniformly enforced, think for example homeless people who might not have access to a clean mask being targeted.
Making up a new kind of law which can be used to fine/arrest literally anyone just for walking down the street “the wrong way” is a big deal.
So... that's because public transportation vehicles, like busses, are big. When you smash your small car into a big bus, the bus is fine, and you're a pancake.
On a train, were it to derail, your seatbelt won't help you.
Nothing nefarious going on here.
I fail to see how any of the examples you pointed out have any relevance to the subject.
The point was that there are plenty of examples of behavior that's deemed mandatory in order to uphold the common good. Wearing face masks during a pandemic fits the bill. You don't negate this by cherry-picking unrelated examples that aren't covered. I mean, not requiring seatbelts on public busses is just as acceptable as not requiring facemasks while staying within private property and for the same reasons: the negligible risk that's presented to both the public and the individual.
We know that both policies obtain a public health benefit. Both policies are also not “blanket policies” but rather should be carefully tailored based on expected benefits changing depending on circumstances. For seat-belts it’s mainly the type of vehicle, but then remember there’s also variables like child seats which vary depending on age, height, and weight and it can get complicated. For masks it’s even more dynamic. E.g. it can’t be expressed simply as “everyone wear masks”.
Both also have, or need to have, limits on how strictly they are enforced, even if that means imperfect compliance.
The reason we (culturally) accept this trade-off is because the enforcement is accomplished through a form of sanctioned violence by the State, and that sanctioned State violence carries a cost / public health risk of its own!
After all this is said and done, recall it’s not a binary switch. Mask wearing is a continuum for each addition interrupted transmission. By the time we’re done with all this, how much have we moved the needle?
Lastly, keep in mind focusing on implementing one policy comes at the cost of having the time and political capital to implement some other policy. Politicians which claim they can “walk and chew gum” at the same time are generally over-estimating their own capabilities.
If you're really interested in framing the problem that way then in the very least include in your analysis the social cost of dealing with thousands of deaths that otherwise could be easily avoided if everyone just wore their facemasks in public.
So far the US alone experienced over 150k deaths by covid19. What's the social cost of that?
All together it still hasn’t stopped COVID in its tracks, and with tens of millions of active cases, there’s no scientific basis for expecting that it would.
Short answer; it’s possible some percentage of them would be delayed.
I think it makes people feel better to have something to blame, particular when it sounds just so simple.
Maybe that makes it a great analogy -- it's a state-by-state patchwork just like mask laws :)
Asserting that a change to the status quo is the same as the existing status quo that you already "bought in to" 5-50 years ago (for most of us) is in a lot of ways not the same at all.
Further it's possible to opt out of seat belts by not driving and you can kind of opt out of government IDs also by not driving or flying. It'd be difficult but if you really, really cared you could.
I'm not saying that these people's reaction is entirely rational. But if you want to try and understand them a bit better I think my very, very loose analogy might help you. If you don't want to understand them feel free to ignore entirely!
You didn't thought things through. If you're talking about a global pandemic then quite obviously you aren't talking about a scenario where the state of things already changed radically.
Moreover, I fail to see how keeping things as they are can be passed as a rational argument against something. You're actually arguing that things should not change because otherwise things would change, which makes absolutely no sense at all.
I agree that the state of the world has changed radically. What we're debating is how the law should change. The world will get over C19 in another year or two. We're still stuck with a PATRIOT Act from 2001. That's 19 years ago now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
> Moreover, I fail to see how keeping things as they are can be passed as a rational argument against something. You're actually arguing that things should not change because otherwise things would change, which makes absolutely no sense at all.
I was attempting to suggest that there's a difference between "things which already are a given and have been for a long time" vs "new things which we're going to decide are a thing newly, right now".
Yes seatbelts are essentially mandatory (if you drive) and have been so for the last 30-50 years depending on state. But I think it's not entirely fair to compare new mandates/requirements/laws to existing ones. The existing ones have had a chance for their long-term implications to play out. The new ones would be new. We don't know all the long-term implications of the new thing. It's probably impossible to know what the long term implications would be.
What I don't see (sadly) is anyone saying "hey lets make masks mandatory until expiration on Jan1 2021 with possible 6mo extensions after that". So people who are worried about government overreach have every reason to be worried! The pandemic is very, very unlikely to last forever. The laws that get passed are very, very unlikely to ever be repealed. PATRIOT Act was a temporary measure until we "got" the terrorists. It's nearly 20 years later. It only took a decade in Afghanistan to bankrupt the USSR. We're going on two decades. These concerns may not be entirely foolish.
Not driving (or being the passenger in a car) is all but impossible in the vast majority of the US. In fact, it’s almost equal to saying “just don’t go to any public places” in response to your gun requirement hypothetical.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/driver-crash-passed-wearing-n95-ma...
Rare? Sure. But so is a COVID death of a healthy young person.