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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

Or you could just wear a mask and social distance and not congregate indoors with random strangers for long periods of time

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These are necessarily temporary measures. Life cannot go on forever with these restrictions in place. Either medical science will find a way to limit the danger or people will adapt to their new, more dangerous world. I am not an anti-masker, but asking for permanent social distancing is not realistic.

In Asia, some people are doing this for decades.

Asia has absolutely not been social distancing, avoiding indoor gatherings and universally wearing masks for decades. After SARS, the social acceptability of wearing a mask, especially when sick increased. It was by no means the standard for everyone. I know you said "some people". Some people in the west also have germ pobia.

I think voluntary mask wearing becoming a new norm is fine with me

Masks are a major hindrance to communication.

1) People's voices become muffled

2) I can not read their lips

3) Emotional-facial cues are much harder to pick up on.

This cannot be a permanent state of affairs.

It can, and already is in much of asia. When ever you're sick, you wear a mask.

Are you speaking for literally every human?

Well, they said "fine with me", so... no?

The idea of making every one wear a mask as the new social norm is "fine with them".

The great grand parent post said voluntary.

In the new future, I might just start wearing masks on the subway in winter by the default. The cost is very low and the benefit is moderate.

For your entire life? IDK about you but I'm ok with getting a common cold or the flu once every few years to live a normal life.

Every few years? My experience is more like every 6 weeks in the winter. Even with lock down I have caught the second cold of the season. I am guessing you don't have kids

Sure, reducing transmission rate makes you less likely to be exposed in the first place. But it's not an alternative solution to a cure.

Corona's have been with mankind since before history. They never go away and its a matter of time before you are exposed to one of the coronas again.

While those are certainly measures to take, they're a non answer. We need to return to some amount of noalcy, and none of those measures are up to snuff. Literally everyone where I live wears a mask and distances, yet cases are sky high. Somehow my grandfather caught the virus despite his assisted living home despite them being so locked down that we haven't been able to see him in person besides through a glass window. Masks and distancing just spread the deaths out over time, but they aren't a solution.

Believe it or not, some of us don't like social distancing and mandatory masks in perpetuity. If we had spent more money on developing these kinds of vaccines years ago, we might not be in the situation we are in now. If you like being isolated then be my guest, but don't be on a high horse about "just" wearing masks, and so forth at this point. We all get it. Yet people continue to get sick and die.

>We all get it. Yet people continue to get sick and die.

Is that because the interventions (masking, social distancing) are de facto ineffective, or because a critical mass of people simply ignores them?

I don't think we really know for sure. My guess is that it's both, but that even if masks/distancing were 100% effective on their own, it's not practical to expect enough people to take them seriously enough. This isn't an engineering problem, but a human one. This is why I take issue with those here who just blame everyone not participating for why the virus has spread. By the law of averages, you will never get everyone to comply. You need virtually everyone to comply for the virus to be stopped, and all it takes is a small number of people to allow a virus to spread, which keeps happening when you keep enough healthy people from even beginning to build an immunity. These social measures are stop gaps, and anyone suggesting "or we can just social distance" as if that's an alternative to vaccines needs to get a clue. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the numbers before and after lockdowns and other restrictions are put in place to realize that they aren't impactful enough to be considered a solution.

eternal 2020

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