Out of curiosity, what is your basis for wearing a mask?
But it is scientifically proven to limit the rate of the spread, which is the least I can do to protect myself and those around me.
I don't care if I get covid ... I don't think it will kill me based on my vitals. However, we don't fully understand the long term physical and mental health implications of having it (both neurological and psychological), we don't understand it from a 'pre-existing condition' standpoint, and hey who knows it could hit me like a train and do me serious harm or kill me. Plus, I would like to further the goal of eliminating the virus entirely, and not spreading it to others helps that.
I can't believe there are still people out there clamoring to the idea that there is any other way.
As an analogy, I'd explain it like this. What if in the process to encourage people to wear seatbelts, drivers who did that then felt entitled to drive even faster thus resulting in even worse accidents and more frequent ones at that. Of course, no driver would actually think like that.
While I wear my mask, I do wonder about its overall effectiveness especially if in total we all engage in riskier behavior that we wouldn't have otherwise if we simply lived with the basic fear that you have to stay away from everyone.
Masks "help", but maybe they "help" most by thinking of them as not a help at all. It's a tough paradox to encode into public health messaging.
As a counter, my intuition is that masks also remind people of the risks and actually encourage safe behavior. I feel this in myself, a greater awareness of the pandemic, a nudge towards being more careful. Extending your analogy, it's as if the seatbelt reminded people that there are some pretty grisly accidents out there, and maybe they should take it easy.
Both effects probably exist, not sure what wins out, and how much it matters.
It doesn't.
There’s your answer then
fwiw, I wear a mask when I HAVE to go out for groceries, and avoid going out on unnecessary errands (shopping, dining out)
even if it encourages risky behavior, there's no evidence that it does it enough to translate to higher spread overall, which is what matters. As long as the net impact doesn't increase transmission, they're not a problem.
The worst neighborhoods for COVID over the summer were ones that were known for poor mask compliance, anyway.
Looking at it another way: I don’t smoke because I don’t want to risk pulmonary disease. Am I hurting the economy?
I don’t expect everyone to care about my life (maybe I’ll cause a blip in some chart) - but I do above almost everything else.
1. Hospital Capacity: Economic shutdowns have been largely to manage Hospital capacity since if all the hospitals in an area are overwhelmed, the death toll will grow since patients suffering any kind of acute issue will have nowhere to turn
2. The spread of disease (COVID-19): This is what is trying to be controlled by encouraging people to perform effective steps to limit the spread (with a second-order effect of reducing demand on the hospital) -- that is, if less people get the disease, less people die from the disease, and we can get a vaccine program and have an overall lower casualty rate from COVID-19.
Both of these strategies do not have to be employed.
For example, in the case where there's no effective vaccine in the near future, it might make sense to simply ensure that everyone gets infected at a slow enough rate that Hospital Capacity is not critical. This is because with this pandemic, over a long enough timeline (and again, without an effective vaccine), everyone will get the disease eventually. So in this scenario you are simply concerned about managing hospital capacity, and your tools are masks, social distancing, and economic shutdowns -- no need to track the infection, etc. Some locales are using this approach, and shutting down hot-spots without too much focus on how the disease is spreading, but most developed countries are tracking the spread much more closely and can be more targeted with the guidance. This was likely the initial thinking of many people, and why a shutdown did not occur before disease had spread widely.
On the other hand, if you assume a compliant population a near total economic shutdown to for a short period of time, with strict social distancing and containment measure to ensure that there is no spread, along with no new individuals, and a strong track-trace policy, then you can eradicate the cases with minimal masks. This is basically what China did, as far as I understand it. This was the initial model other locales tried to implement when they went into "Lockdown"-mode, but were not as successful, also -- again, from my limited understanding as a lay person.
On a third hand, if we assume we are going to have an effective vaccine in the near future (which was FAR from certain when this whole thing played out) it makes more sense to do both in concert -- that is, primarily limit the total number of people infected (masks and social distancing; this is because the long term outcomes of people afflicted with COVID-19 are unknown, limit that unknown risk) with a secondary task of managing Hospital capacity to prevent things from becoming catastrophic. This is sort-of where most locales have landed at the moment: Mandate masks (slow the spread) and shutdown hot-spots as they are detected (manage hospital capacity).
Masks alone don't cause the widespread panic, mass media did their part.
Nobody here panicked in February, or the first week of March. We were more or less going about our daily lives like normal, because that's what the state health people told us to do. Nobody wore masks, nobody social distanced.
By April 1st, NYC was seeing 500 deaths a day and increasing. It's the largest mass casualty event in NYC since 9/11, and was much worse, in body-count terms. It was comparable to the 1918 flu epidemic.
https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20200821/exce...
Of course, a NYC-level of mass death is absolutely not guaranteed to happen elsewhere. Different populations, different habits, luck- there's variables. But do not tell me that it's media hysteria when you didn't listen to ambulance sirens for a month.
> We are not defenseless against COVID-19. Cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus -- particularly when used universally within a community setting. All Americans have a responsibility to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.
I trust his expertise and judgment. What's the basis for ignoring his advice and not wearing a mask?
Ordinary medical masks are easy to get now. N95 masks are still hard to get in the US. The trick that makes N95 masks work is that they have a middle layer that's an electret with tiny holes, with a semi-permanent static charge. That will capture solid particles smaller than the holes by electrostatic attraction. So it can actually stop an aerosol. Cloth masks and the lower tiers of medical masks don't have that.
It's pathetic that, nine months into the epidemic, the US doesn't have N95 masks in volume production. Prices on eBay are 10x normal. Normal price is under $20 for a box of 20. Where's the "free market"?
Meanwhile, in South Korea, the government adopted a non-free-market solution and has been making KN95 masks available to its population through a combination of rationing and subsidies. Everyone has access to two masks a week, and the overwhelming majority of people wear them.
South Korea has one of the lowest rates of infection in the world and is one of the few economies expected to grow in 2020.
It's hardly a free market when there's anti price gouging laws.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22789340
>The common theme is that during an outbreak like this, everybody wants to be his customer. But as soon as an outbreak subsides, his customers dump him and run back to China. The reason? His masks may cost a dime each, but a made-in-China mask might go for two cents.
>“Last time he geared up and went three shifts a day working his tail off,” the mayor recalled. “As soon as the issue died, he didn’t have any sales. He had to pay unemployment for all these people, and he had to gear down.”
Of course the need for ventilators was predicted well before the rationing was occuring, so if the administration had acted sooner rationing may have been avoided.
Instead ventilators were no longer and issue by the time they were being produced.
ISTR recently seeing that 90% of "KN95" masks independently tested do not meet the published requirements for the rating, so, I'd hope that is worse than N95 (the requirements are slightly different, but substantively similar), though still probably better than cloth masks.
If someone doesn’t want to wear a mask that is their choice. Your choice is to avoid situations where you might be in contact with people who don’t wear masks. It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
I personally believe in wearing masks, though primarily feel the value in the typical cloth or surgical masks are keeping you from touching your face.
Do you also believe this about laws prohibiting drunk driving, or regulating seatbelt wearing and the side of the road you're allowed to drive on? OSHA rules around workplace safety, hardhats, fall protection? I'll wait to see if the anti-mask crowd crusades against the infringement of their "right" to drive intoxicated. Otherwise, I'll continue to see it for what it is: Political virtue signaling and contrarianism sans empathy.
It should be (and is) perfectly possible to legally avoid wearing a mask in places with mask regulations. You may do this by avoiding public places.
> It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
Strange how selectively this idea is applied by some in this country.
Natural rights are a social fiction and have as much or as little power as we believe they have. You appear to have a strong belief in them, but their power is limited by how much you can convince others to believe.
I hear your line of reasoning from these same crazed individuals so I am lead to believe that this is the extreme end of that set of beliefs without also observing the corollary that I mention above..
Would the same principal apply if the other person had ebola?
What about someone like Typhoid Mary - should her right to do what she wanted be placed higher than the rights of others not to be infected?
No different than requiring you to wear shirts and shoes.
They are, in fact, government granted whether or not the theory of granting them is that the government was obligated to because of preexisting moral rights, and its quite likely that there was not universal consensus on the underlying theory among everyone involved in drafting, proposing, and ratifying them.
But more importantly, "the right to not be mandated to wear covering over some part of the body to protect either public health or public morality" is not explicitly, or given the history of such mandates and their survival against challenge, on the evidence of legal precedent implicitly a right in the Constitution. You are arguing for a novel right that goes against the well-settled understanding of the rights in the Constitution (whether Amendments 1-10 or otherwise); which is fine, most people would agree things like Loving or Brown were good decisions despite the fact that the rights involved had not previously been recognized in the form those decisions found them. But to argue for such a novel interpretation of Constitutional rights, you need more than vague handwaving at the Constitution in general, you need an argument about how the explicit text in the Constitution supports your novel interpretation.
> If someone doesn’t want to wear a mask that is their choice.
Yes, but it is not a choice that, either morally or Constitutionally, needs to be free of consequences, including restricting the scope of available activities one may engage in.
If someone chooses not to wear covering over their genitals, that's their choice, but its fairly uncontroversial that the law may restrict them from being in public places when they make that choice.
> Your choice is to avoid situations where you might be in contact with people who don’t wear masks. It’s not to force everyone into your beliefs.
I have yet to see a mask mandate that concerns itself with mandate beliefs, only actions in cases where one is exposed to other people (and, invariably in those I've seen, people who live outside of the subject's household.)
> I personally believe in wearing masks, though primarily feel the value in the typical cloth or surgical masks are keeping you from touching your face.
The value of cloth or surgical masks is in reducing the distance (and quantity at any given distance) of droplet spready from exhalation, sneezes, and coughing. They aren't as good as better masks, or social distancing, but the general recommendation (and, in many case, mandate) is for them to be worn in situations where essential activities make the recommended social distancing impossible to maintain/guarantee.
In my mind, the above facts are really all that's necessary: dense population + minimal lock down + universal mask wear == low Covid19 rates.
There are many other good reasons as well.
I appreciate the contrary feedback.
Do you have a link to the high mask compliance in Indiana handy? I've honestly looked for this kind of data and haven't been able to find it, and so assumed fairly poor (US-wide at least) mask wear based on anecdotes.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/06/pandemic...
That's horseshit. I live in lefty, liberal, science-believing Silicon Valley and I see less than half the people walking on the streets wearing masks.
That is to say, I believe the survey is targeted for indoor mask usage, as this is also the mandate in most states that mandate mask wearing (while indoors, or outdoors when 6 feet is not possible)
One hard lockdown, supported by incredibly through contact tracing was.
I don't think a single polity in the US, including NYC had a single hard lockdown.
And I know that not a single polity in the US has managed to do effective contact tracing.
To be clear: I wasn't saying that minimal lockdown was the reason for low numbers, though how I laid it out is definitely unclear.
My belief is that near universal mask compliance is the main reason some countries have managed to keep the virus under control even though they haven't been forced to do severe lockdowns.
Your point about contact tracing is relevant of course. I know both Japan and S. Korea did a lot of that, and of course the US didn't even try.
This may perhaps (along with masks, and the use of pretty much every source of data by Korea) explain much of the variance in outcomes.
Protecting those around me if I happen to be carrying but asymptomatic. If it reduces the chances of spreading the disease by even 1% then it's worth a slight inconvenience to help keep my fellow humans safe.
IMO, being willing to accept a minor inconvenience for the betterment of the population as whole is a key facet of being a functioning member of society.
First of all, we need central coordination to have a chance to beat something like covid19. Information about it increases daily and news outlets are notoriously bad about getting science-facts correct. Human-to-human communication (aka: let's play telephone) is demonstrably bad at keeping a coherent message. This all leads us to:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien... [Nov 10, 2020]
This lists actual studies based on human populations and outbreaks that indicate mask wearing is effective. It also lists references if you want to dive into the sources for yourself.
Bottom line: this isn't about belief in masks. It's about belief in real world results.