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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand any anti-mask protest despite any claims of lacking scientific backing because why not? Just wear a mask. It's practically free to do and if it makes people feel safer then that is a good enough reason alone. All this arguing on details of how effective they are misses the point completely.

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It's way beyond masks. It's shutting down schools (mostly fine for upper-middle class types, potentially crippling for the less well off), wiping out small businesses, and forbidding any semblance of normal social life. Minimizing this as "just masks and social distancing" hugely underestimates the costs.

Good thing nobody is allowed to play soccer right now, considering all the goalpost-moving going on.

It's only killed 0.1% of Americans, after all.

If everyone wore masks and took social distancing seriously then we’d long have seen the back of the virus. All my friends in Singapore, China and Taiwan are already living normal lives again. All this pandemic has done is revealed the flaws of hyper-individualism. I have much less respect for my fellow westerners and even some old friends after this experience. Just a childishly pathetic way to approach life and society.

It should be a no-brainer if it weren't for some particularly dumb politicization of the issue.

We aren't gonna get proper RCTs and hard evidence any time soon. But it's such a simple and plausible intervention, we do have good reasons to believe they help and they don't hurt anyone. It's all just so infantile

I agree that it's a simple and plausible intervention. What do you think about gloves, goggles, and tyvek suits?

I'd suggest you to physically make a chart of convenience, likely protection, availability, plausibility, ease of implementation and a few other dimensions for masks and the other instruments you've mentioned. It might help you to see the absurdness of these comparisons.

Those were simple and plausible suggestions, and yet (intentionally) absurd. You invoked costs, benefits, and tradeoffs to make that fact clear. And for what it's worth, gloves still meet the criteria - simple plausible low-cost is not the same as evidence-based. Health authorities (in Canada) most certainly were suggesting we mitigate indirect-contact transmission, with regular sterilization of surfaces using bleach being widely advocated. Gloves are widely available both in their medical and reusable cloth versions, and carry even fewer risks to social disruption than do masks.

I'm totally fine with the structure of the argument with respect to mask mandates as it's typically made. Assuming no costs and at least some benefits, sure, I don't see a problem - this is within basic morality territory so far. But if the parameters are in question? My datapoint: mask mandates have effectively destroyed a familiar relationship, because it put me in the position of asking a good-faith question to a zealot. I judge the costs to me to be extremely, life-changingly high while the benefits remain uncertain.

If those things are free - if there's a chance I'm saving someone's life by wearing them - then I'd be a monster to refuse because it's inconvenient to me.

I'm guessing you have an equally ridiculous slippery-slope follow-up as well?

There's a reason why passenger vehicles don't come equipped with roll cages, 5 point harnesses, and why there's no law mandating that motorists and their passengers wear crash helmets.

Simply put, a 3 point restraint that's much easier to put on provides a decent amount of protection in the event of a crash. On the other hand, if one is engaged in motor sports, racing, etc., then the other safety measures are necessary. Just like one would use additional safety measures when working in a healthcare setting.

How do you even run a randomised controlled trial of mask usage?

What's the double blinded placebo for a mask?

Assuming you could even get an ethics committee to sign of on the experiment.

I agree the data could be helpful, but I don't think that's the 'right' way to get it.

It isn’t free. Among other things, “making people feel safer” can easily have the consequence that they stop doing the things that actually matter. It’s called “risk compensation”.

Arguing that this isn’t a significant risk just begs the question: without positive data for effectiveness, nobody has any idea.

If wearing a mask was free for everyone, obviously no one would be bothered by them. Just because you don't understand people's reasons it doesn't mean they don't exist or are less valid than making people feel safer. Consider, for example, people with claustrophobia.

A list of scientific backing: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien... (see "Human Studies of Masking and SARS-CoV-2 Transmission").

Thanks. This is literally more than I've seen published from my local government in a year.

>It's practically free to do

The social costs are nonzero, so I wouldn't say it's free.

Making people think they are safe is not sufficient reason to force everyone to wear a mask. It’s only justified if we have good reason to think they work.

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