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Comment by mstokholm | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind that these are two slightly different things. Masks might not reduce your personal risk of infection, but they might reduce the risk of you infecting others. In either case, you would see a reduction in the total amount of transmission.

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Are people still confused that the reason you wear a mask is not to protect yourself directly, but to protect others thereby indirectly protecting yourself? It seems so, because in the west people are still arguing about wearing masks, and doing these inane studies, while in Asia people wear masks and go about their business as usual.

What do you call the west? Here in Spain we are mandated by law to wear them, there’s no arguing (or freedom)

Yes, you're right of course. "The west" is a big place with many different moving parts, just like Asia. So things aren't the same everywhere. It's just that there are many western countries where the arguments about mask wearing and social distancing are still going on while the pandemic is raging while in most of Asia that isn't happening and the pandemic has largely been nipped in the bud.

I do wonder how much of that is because Japan (and China, to a certain degree) had normalised mask wearing well before this year.

And Thailand and Taiwan (I think) and maybe a few other countries. I think that is certainly a factor.

But something seemed to change, at least here in Thailand. Although mask wearing was normalized in cities as self-protection against air pollution, many/most people seemed to come around to the notion that mask-wearing was a collective effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. Seems like a cultural effect - more collectivist rather than individualist thinking.

> while in Asia people wear masks and go about their business as usual.

I'd be curious to see if mask wearing Asian countries had less incidence of the flu than western countries.

Yes, very much so. From my experience people wear masks and visors to protect themselves. I honestly do not think the average person view wearing a mask as something they do to protect others. It's a little weird, because at the same time people seem very conscious about the risk when people around them can't or won't wear a mask.

At least in Denmark I don't think it's communicated very well why you should wear a mask. The government says "wear a mask" so the majority wears a mask. It's great that we have that level of trust in government, but it also sometimes mean that things are communicated as well as they should be.

Exactly, the whole argument is dumb. Until it's proved that masks don't reduce transmission, they should be mandatory (and freely distributed by governments). The burden on the wearer is so small, and the potential upside so large, I don't really see why there's any debate at all.

The fact that places in the world (like Adelaide and Melbourne) even considered lockdown before requiring masks was incredibly lazy and/or negligent.

Does one not need to be infected to effectively transmit the virus? I.e. if you're infected your body is actively multiplying the virus. If you're not infected, then you're just passing on whatever virus you happen to be contaminated with. There's a massive difference between the two I should think.

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