It also demonstrates why the "personal choice" stuff is BS here. I see a lot of folks going "why are you worried if you're following the rules yourself?", and yet...
> None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.
> None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.
It's sort of like the pool at my kids' swim school. If other toddlers were being allowed to go in the pool without a swim diaper, then it really wouldn't matter if my own kid is wearing one or not. They'd still be swimming in water that's repeatedly being fouled by uncontained feces.
Regular masks absolutely provide substantial - admittedly, not perfect, but substantial - personal protection.
There is no evidence for this, and if you read the CDC guidance document that suggested it this week, you'll see that every citation in the newly added section refers to studies about filtration efficiency, which is a very different question:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien...
The high-quality evidence for masks has not changed substantially since March. The few lines of direct evidence suggest that it's possible they help a tiny amount, but we haven't been able to detect much evidence of this, either way. Only by combining multiple (poor) studies together, pooling the data and statistically re-weighting the pooled results was the WHO meta-analysis able to find any signal at all, and the signal wasn't strong:
http://www.economicsfaq.com/retract-the-lancets-and-who-fund...
In 2020, we've had a number of studies that attempt to use statistical analysis of infection data from late spring (when cases were declining in the northern hemisphere) to draw conclusions about masks, and a handful of anecdotes that are repeated frequently by the media -- the Missouri hairdresser, the Korean Starbucks -- that were neither controlled, nor subjected to statistical analysis of any sort.
The only randomized controlled trial conducted on masks for personal protection against Covid -- the highest quality form of evidence for a health intervention -- has been completed since June, and rejected by three major publications:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04337541
https://www.berlingske.dk/videnskab/professor-stort-dansk-ma...
Moreover, as we have now seen, most of the places around the world with mask mandates and high rates of self-reported compliance are experiencing spikes in infection. At the very least, these call into question the publications that attempted to make claims based on data from the spring. We're starting to see retractions related to this:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.21.20208728v...
I expect there will also be social penalties. The world isn't going to forget the people who chose not to take basic steps to protect each other. It's a violation of the social contract, and that comes with consequences.
Imagine, for instance, that we started tracing HIV strains and jailing gay people.
And then arguing that having sex isn't really necessary and abstinence is the only way to prevent transmission.
The implications of what you're saying is appalling.
If someone went around having unprotected sex without telling their partners, then I don't see a problem with a civil suit from anyone they infected to make them pay for the damages they inflicted.
If I were to distort your view like you did mine, I'd say that you're arguing for the ability to go around punching anyone else in the face because to prevent you from doing so would be starting down a slippery slope that would lead to authoritarianism.
"you must face the consequences" is perhaps the most authoritarian thing you could say when arguing in favor of severe penalties.
The wedding attendees used their "personal choice" to attend the wedding and get sick. But we don't know how they transmitted it to people once they left. Were the people they infected taking precautions? Or were they also using "personal choice" not to?
But, it's reasonable question to ask, what's the acceptable number of casualties. The answer is not zero. We have plenty of other diseases that kill lots of people. COVID is more but we still have to pick a number.
Is 1 in 100 ok? 1 in 500? 1 in 1000? 1 in 5k? (the car rate), 1 in 10k? (the flu rate).
I heard about this thinking on the Sam Harris podcast. He mentioned some people claiming if we lifted all restrictions by their estimates deaths would be 1 in 300. He and his interviewee dismissed out of hand without giving it any thought which was very disappointing. Whether or not it actually would be 1 in 300 we still have to pick a number below which we'd accept the losses. Is there a reasonable way to decide that number? Flu is around 1 in 10k (or at least my 30 seconds of searching seem to put it in the same order of magnitude) so apparently that's an acceptable number and we don't apparently get upset as a society that people go around spreading the flu. (though I get super upset personally)
We need to face the reality that on average people make bad choices which leads to substantial negative outcomes for any group. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic again confirms empirically that humans on average don’t have self-responsibility.
How can philosophical ideas that are founded on principles such as “humans have self-responsibility” then still deem credibility for any larger group of people?
Why do we need laws that mandate seatbelts? Won’t people wear them by themselves? And if not, what does that mean to the whole house of cards of Liberalism?
If Covid were an STD there would be huge social pressure on it even though it would be passed less frequently.
And yet people in many countries reject it.
If a significant amount of people already makes a bad choice at this point where it affects themselves we cannot expect these people to make good choices to protect others.
Also, the laws aren't solely about the wearer; not wearing seatbelts at scale has societal costs.
People ride motorcycles despite vastly higher death and injury rates than cars, cause it's fun. (I did for awhile and might start doing so again one day.)
I'm not disagreeing with you I don't think? I agree that it's a really stupid thing to not wear a seatbelt. I just think it's important to consider how to solve these problems without throwing up our hands and saying "people are irredeemably stupid" because that doesn't really do much good for anyone.
When it comes to things that are defined by social consensus (like whether or not one should wear a seat-belt, or smoke indoors, etc) like the hypothetical "average person" is always correct by definition.
HIV/AIDS was that.
Covid-19 is interesting in that it's on the margin for death rates, and its long-term health effects are more varied and subtle than those for, say, polio.
Also, we do have BAC limits for driving, and public intoxication prohibitions.
Is there really? One thing that has always struck me since the beginning of this pandemic is precisely why people would be more willing to attach their seatbelts than to wear a mask. Perhaps not the best comparison to make, though.
From personal experience and the experience of many friends I can confirm (anecdotally, but still) that in Eastern Europe there exist many societies where putting on a seatbelt is socially stigmatized.
None of this has to be accepted or conceded to, somehow East Asian countries are able to do to this right, even New Zealand just so we don't start hovering on West vs East, this is absolutely not "humans on average don't have self-responsibility", this is a specific culture that has promoted entitlement, selfishness, materialist hedonism, and ruthless, hackneyed individualism since the late 60s and now the bill has come due
But you’re right that culture can bring out the worst out of people and that we are getting the bill now.
It's fascinating to watch, for example, people commenting on Facebook about vehicles driving too fast in winter conditions, endangering other road users. But those same Facebook commenters will say that nobody can order them to wear a mask...
It's the easiest thing to enforce, too. In my city alone, a single police officer with two functioning eyes could probably issue hundreds of mask violations a day. It's not like you have to search someone or go out of your way to see they aren't wearing a mask.
odd comparison to make. I find that in the midatlantic US, speeding and DUI are not enforced very consistently. with speeding, there seem to be only a couple days of the month (usually the last few days) where a bunch of cops are out with radar/lidar pulling people over. with DUI, you are quite likely to get away with it if you aren't intoxicated to the point where your driving is noticeably erratic. the exception would be the few times each year where they actually have checkpoints on certain roads.
> It's the easiest thing to enforce, too. In my city alone, a single police officer with two functioning eyes could probably issue hundreds of mask violations a day. It's not like you have to search someone or go out of your way to see they aren't wearing a mask.
this seems like it could be counterproductive. for one thing, issuing a ticket is necessarily a close physical interaction. for another, what if the interaction goes south and the cop has to grapple with the offender, arrest them, and take them to jail? does this really serve the goal of preventing covid transmission?
and vice versa, do you think?
The thinking is that the restaurant should be certified by industry not by the government, kind of like how the ASE certifications work for mechanics.
Libertarians that I've read and met, in general, want to remove government policies that force entanglement or reliance on the government. A good example is DUIs; reasonably, we know that driving while impaired is dangerous, but what we don't want is for someone to make the mistake of doing that being beholden to the governments whims for their entire lives, which is currently how it works.
There's risk in everything we do, including for other people. What amount of risk is acceptable is a subjective choice.
This is why masks and gathering limits are prudent.
There's a difference between reckless endangerment/homicide than an accident. Ridiculous false equivalency.
And yet, comparison of catching a virus to homicide by gun is not.
"Sure, just like drunk driving or twitching your trigger finger when someone just happens to be in front of the gun."
And I quoted you -- you make a comparison to homicide. Comparing catching a virus to homicide of any sort is...extreme.
If you're going to argue that gun homicide and drunk driving are examples that should also be followed here, you are making the analogy between catching a virus and those examples.
That was not intended as a comparison, but as an obvious example of where "my body, my choice" clearly does not apply to making a slight movement of your index finger.
OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion.
Your response was that we make just such an exception for guns and drunk driving. The implication, therefore, is that this is of such an equivalent moral imperative, that the same reactions are justified here.
You may not want to be drawing the analogy, but if you aren't, there's no point in raising the subject at all.
I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments.
"My body, my choice" doesn't apply in the same fashion when other people's rights are also involved. (And, to head-off the "nuh-uh", pro-choicers tend to fall down on the "no" side of fetal personhood.)
It's nothing like either of those, let alone "just like" them.
Catching a virus is not, in any way, like pulling the trigger on gun or choosing to drink and drive. The former happens to you. The latter two require personal agency.
Poor example, as Firearms safety 101 would prevent this:
- always point weapon in safe direction
- finger off trigger until ready to fire
- know your target and what is behind it
- treat every weapon as if it were loaded.
- wash your hands
- wear a mask
- practice social distancing
- avoid extended periods indoors with non-household members
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
...which isn't different than any other year.
Every year, the flu kills tens of thousands (in the US -- higher worldwide). Disproportionately children.
Every year, driving kills hundreds of thousands, even when you exclude the effects of alcohol.
Every year, people have sex without condoms, and pass on harmful -- possibly fatal -- viruses.
Every year, millions of people die from communicable disease of every sort, ranging from pneumonia to HIV.
This is the first time in my life that we've tried to apply transitive risk logic to justify curtailing of individual freedoms. Masks are one thing, but telling people that they can't have family gatherings because it might hurt you?
This seems wrong to me. You can use this logic to justify literally any curtailment of personal freedom.
Seems wrong to me, too. There exists no society (that I'm aware of) where the decisions of an individual don't have second or third order effects on other members of the society. We manage and deal with this risk every day of our lives. Sometimes it flat out sucks. However, you can't control for it without raising a lot of very, very uncomfortable questions about what personal choices get to be made, by whom, and under which conditions.
This boils down to how you see the world, I guess. Much like any of the usual contentious political topics, both 'camps' view the other side as morally reprehensible.
I'm not "free" to start cooking commercially out of my home kitchen without inspections and licensing. This impacts my ability to earn an income -- because otherwise I might make you sick.
It's public health risk mitigation. We do it all the time.
Not responsive to the argument. You might hurt me in any other year, too. We don't tell people to avoid their families at thanksgiving, stop going into the office, etc. "all the time". It's unique. This year.
The flu is about as dangerous to me as SARS-CoV2, for example. How many years of your life, so far, have you avoided seeing your family at holidays in order to protect me?
Cars are also more dangerous to me than SARS-CoV2. How many years of your life have you avoided automobiles, because you might kill me in an accident?
The logic is the same. You may feel as though there is a justification for telling people not to see their families at Thanksgiving, but that's your opinion. Other people have different opinions, and they're equally valid.
Every year I get the flu shot to protect me, you, and our shared healthcare.
I (like many people) am at ~zero risk of serious disease, so we're back to the same transitive logic: apparently my catching a virus is morally equivalent to overloading the healthcare system, because I might give it to someone who is at risk. Well, likewise: you risk putting someone else in the hospital by catching the flu. Has it stopped you from living before?
And of course, there is a matter of degree: getting a seasonal shot is one thing; demanding that people avoid seeing their families is entirely another.
Finally, consider that every young, healthy person who gets this virus is afterward immune, and contributes to overall population immunity. Therefore, getting the virus and recovering from it is a positive outcome for society. This is offset by some small risk of transmission, of course, but that's a manageable risk. After all, masks and social distancing work, right?
funny how critical examination of that premise is not allowed.
Merely questioning it without a plausible explanation that is consistent with the existing data is a distraction. Why should anyone listen to you if that's all you've got?
Interesting that you should say that. The Danish RCT for masks as PPE was just published this week, and showed no statistical effect of masks on protection against SARS-CoV2:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
Despite this study being high quality, the only randomized controlled trial of masks and SARS-CoV2, and of pressing public interest, it was rejected by no fewer than three major scientific journals before publication. That's...unusual, to say the least:
https://www.berlingske.dk/videnskab/professor-stort-dansk-ma...
As a scientist, it has been dismaying to me how willing the scientific community has been to engage in censorship of unpopular opinions in 2020. Even the highest quality evidence is being actively suppressed, if it doesn't fit the "consensus viewpoint".
"And extraordinary claims that contradict both the data and common sense require extraordinary evidence."
In the case of medical interventions, the historical convention is that you do nothing if you cannot prove effectiveness. Said differently: claiming that an intervention works is an extraordinary claim. Assuming that it does not work is, quite literally, the null hypothesis.
> Limitations: ... no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others.
This has always been the main motivation for mask wearing, but the study you cite didn't attempt to answer it.
The Republican Party, Trump, and Fox News did that deliberately because Trump early on chose to downplay the virus and response to it. Backtracking on that would have made Trump lose face and harmed the Republican brand in an election year, so instead they chose to politicize it and double-down on not wearing masks.
This has nothing to do with personal choice and everything to do with culture war nonsense being spread at the expense of just about everyone, purely for the political gain of a tiny fraction of a percent.
Driving kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people a year.
Where is the line when it’s OK to control peoples lives because you are afraid?
This is how authoritarianism starts.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Which numbers on that page are you looking at? Here's what I see:
all deaths involving covid-19: 223,984
all deaths involving influenza, with or without covid-19 or influenza: 6,789
If you permit me to stereotype the HN demographic here- you are probably reading this comment from the comfort of a warm apartment with running water and you're probably not hungry. Removing personal choice is an extremely dangerous idea where those reliable things that you take for granted start to disappear. All you have to do is look to N. Korean, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela right now, this day to see how disastrous it is. You may call me hyperbolic but this is exactly how it starts. If we have to lose some elderly people to a virus (with an IFR of .1%, median age of death of 84 and 92% with comorbidity), i'm sorry to say that we have to lose them. The alternative is authoritative oppression, starvation and misery for hundreds of millions of others. Make no mistake, this is exactly what is at risk when you talk about removing personal freedoms.
I don't have the personal freedom to get drunk and drive my car down the highway because that puts the lives of everyone on the road in jeopardy. Spreading disease is the same thing. Your personal freedoms end when they start invading my personal freedom to continue living.
Let me ask you something; Has there been any setting in the past 50 years other than changing sexual mores in which people have gained any personal freedom? And have any of the instances in which people lost bits of their freedoms in that same timeframe ever been reversed (again aside from changing sexual mores)?
If you do want to ignore all those issue, I will point out that freedom of speech is more prominent today than it was 50 years ago. After repeal of the fairness doctrine, the loosening of obscenity laws, and various court cases including Citizens United most recently, free speech rights might be at an all time high in the US.
Also there are examples of freedom being lost and regained in gun ownership. The assault weapons ban in the US that lasted 10 years is one that comes to mind.
The reason I said that about sexual mores is because from my perspective almost all of the increases in personal freedom since the civil rights era have been related to that, and other freedoms have mostly been on a steady decline since that time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good for people to not be forced into some religion’s definition of a ‘good relationship’, but if that’s the only thing heading in the right direction and everything else from an individual rights perspective is heading in the wrong direction it’s a distinction very much worth considering.
So when a pandemic is hitting us and our collective personal responsibility is failing, our only choice is to roll over and get sick?
There are plenty of options to feed those who are going hungry due to COVID, but you should look at who is throwing up roadblocks to assistance.
The current best estimates of IFR for SARS-CoV2 are:
* 0-19 years: 0.00003 (0.003%)
* 20-49 years: 0.0002 (0.02%)
* 50-69 years: 0.005 (0.5%)
* 70+ years: 0.054. (5.4%)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
"Using these age-specific estimates, we estimate the overall IFR in a typical low-income country, with a population structure skewed towards younger individuals, to be 0.23% (0.14-0.42 95% prediction interval range). In contrast, in a typical high income country, with a greater concentration of elderly individuals, we estimate the overall IFR to be 1.15% (0.78-1.79 95% prediction interval range)."
The CDC citation is aggregating these studies, and (essentially) picking the middle. Cherry picking a single study from the larger pool is not a rebuttal.
It's very strange that people won't just wear a mask (with it over their mouth and nose). There might be some tiny fraction of people that have a real issue with it, but not anywhere the number of people that feel the need to loudly object to it.
Surely obvious, but there are people who will think that you make bad personal choices and need to make better ones. If those people also wield extraordinary power, well, it becomes less fun to find yourself suddenly having wrongthink.
(I mean inside places; I don't wear a mask outside either, as I am not going places where there are crowds outside)
Let's not forget the cadre of objectors who want us to wear a mask to protect their peace of mind, explicitly stating this goal as needful. Or those who vociferously demean anyone who objects for personal reasons (e.g. I tear up and start sneezing if I wear a typical cloth mask or sterile surgical mask for more than a few minutes, and have a sinus headache for several hours subsequent; I'm not the only one in this class).
Can you cite the transmission rate for asymptomatic carriers? The false positives for the various tests? The critical aspects of the efficacy of masking?
The easiest way to get infectious people to wear masks is to have everybody do it in high contact situations, there's no need to be fancy about who wears mask during a raging pandemic, so your other two questions don't really need answering.
The measures we've taken are deteriorating society in more subtle ways, and there are deaths and suffering indirectly caused by these measures. They are just not easy to sum up. How many people have killed themselves because of the lockdowns and economic problems? I know of at least one. How many people in third world countries are starving as a result of it? I've read millions. How many families are being torn apart due to increased divorces? These kinds of effects pay out their harm over longer periods of time, and in less obvious ways. We aren't tracking those on a widget on TV.
Because the pro-lockdown, pro-authoritarian case is so much easier to back with clear and obvious numbers the government and media are able to easily manipulate the population, most of whom won't consider the trade-offs, into conformity. This is so sad to watch.
It's not the government ruining people's lives, it's the pandemic.
What about their personal freedom? What about the people who don’t want to work in an environment that might put them or one of their loved ones at risk? You talk about living in a bubble but you don’t seem to consider the teachers, first responders, medical workers, who have to make the choice between working during a pandemic or losing their livelihood.
None countries you mentioned didn’t descend into authoritarianism by enforcing restrictions during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/north-dakota-lets-healt...