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First you say

> Face masks ... don’t work to slow transmission whatsoever

and when pushed on it, you imply that this is true because there’s been no trial on it, which is not how implication works.

You then also try and suggest the presence of an unfalsifiable hypothesis which you don’t try and explain, and seems suggestive that you don’t know what the term means?

It’s unfalsifiable because it requires studying a whole community and sequencing every SARS-2 infection to attribute “blame” to the source of the infection. That is very difficult to do and that is why such an RCT does not exist. And yet most of the world is performing this intervention anyway.

That’s the brilliance of “my mask protects you”. It’s not feasibly falsifiable. “My mask protects me” is very easy to falsify. That’s why we have one RCT that studied exactly that and failed to reach significance.

Again, the theoretical MoA of masking only makes sense if SARS-2 spreads via respiratory droplets. If it spreads via aerosols, the sub-micron aerosol particles stay aloft for minutes-hours and bypass the comparatively giant holes of the mask with ease. The sightly altered directional flow is largely irrelevant. You can watch any of the many videos of someone vaping with a mask on/off to see what I’m talking about. Imagine that every time you exhale.

> It’s unfalsifiable because ... very difficult to do

That’s not what that means.

> The only RCT ever performed for self infection of SARS-2 in the community failed to reach significance.

Do condoms work against sexually transmitted diseases? 5 out of 10 RCT studies reported statistically significant effect. Do condoms work against unwanted pregnancy? 0 out of 4 RCT studies reported statistically significant effect.

https://jech.bmj.com/content/65/2/100

Wow, what an intellectually dishonest description of your citation. It’s looking at interventions to promote condom usage, not condom usage.

Forgive my tone but...just wow.

> It’s looking at interventions to promote condom usage, not condom usage.

So is the mentioned mask RCT study. They should be quite comparable.

Washington [0], Vermont [1], and Maine [2] all got mask mandates last summer. These states have had half the number of cases [3] as other northern-US states.

Masks reduce respiratory disease transmission in hospitals. They work outside of hospitals, too. Covid-19 spreads like any other respiratory disease.

If you don't want to wear a mask, then stay at home. I have the right to participate in society without catching a dangerous disease from you.

If your mask is uncomfortable, then try some different ones. I use masks made by Burlway [4]. They are very soft. They fit my face perfectly and haven't stretched or shrunk. I have 10 of them. I keep clean ones in a drawer near the door. My going out ritual is now "keys mask phone wallet."

[0] https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-announces-stat...

[1] https://vtdigger.org/2020/07/24/scott-orders-mask-mandate/

[2] https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/health/coronavi...

[3] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areasRegional=uswa&area...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08DXY4TBS

> I have the right to participate in society without catching a dangerous disease from you.

You're essentially saying that the disabled (illness is a disability) should be excluded from society.

Shun the unclean and diseased?

You have the option of staying inside if you're afraid of mingling with certain people.

No, this individual is stating that no matter what, people (including the disabled) have to go out in society to things like doctor’s appointments. Everyone has the right not to catch a potentially deadly disease.

“Freedom” does not extend to not wearing masks during a pandemic. Your freedom stops when you are a potential asymptomatic/symptomatic spreader of a potentially deadly disease to others.

Therefore, masks should be required for everyone.

Also, I am disabled and I agree with this poster’s comment. It was definitely not ableist at all. It was 100% in support of masks when out in public.

> Your freedom stops when you are a potential asymptomatic/symptomatic spreader of a potentially deadly disease to others.

I guess condoms must be mandated since antibiotic-resistant STIs are almost inevitable right now.

I guess we have to outlaw unprotected sex.

Is knowingly exposing someone to an STI without their consent in fact uniformly legal everywhere? Have you ever heard of anyone suggesting it be illegal before?

I'm not expressing an opinion here; I'm trying to understand why you would take for granted that everyone thinks such behavior is ok or inevitably legal, setting aside the specific context of COVID and current partisan conflict.

What I'm pointing out it is that, whether people acknowledge it or not, they're treating everyone as though they're infected.

So something like masking is required even if someone seems healthy. It's a regime of constant anxiety and latching onto any and every doom scenario.

So with the same logic, we should be assuming every sex partner has an incurable STI. Especially with the emerging threat of antibiotic-resistant strains, the most risk-avoidant with respect to SARS-CoV-2 would only be consistent by likewise being in favor of extreme measures like mandated condoms, quarantining, forced testing, etc. with something like STIs.

I don't agree with this at all - but it's clear that there's a fixation with COVID that doesn't get applied to other large aspects of society.

If we care about people's health - why don't we lock up fat people and force feed them a strict diet until they're a healthy weight? It's hard for me to see anything under the current public health/political regime that wouldn't justify this.

I guess a lot of people (extrapolating somewhat from myself) feel like wearing a mask when you go in a building other than your home is not extreme nor has it been enforced in an extreme way, contrasting with your hypotheticals.

From what I read on the internet, it's long been a custom in many places in the far east to wear a mask whenever one has or might have the cold or flu or whatever.

At this point, I'm thinking why shouldn't we westerners adopt that, going forward?

It appears that wearing masks drastically reduced flu transmission, which seems logical given that it's much less contagious than covid-19. That presumably saved many lives.

And the common cold is not worth developing an advanced vaccine against, but what would we be losing if we prevent its transmission?

So I don't see why masks are a bad thing even if covid vanished tomorrow. There are so many measures we take to mitigate things that have substantial known and unknown risks, so it's mysterious to me why people are so vehemently against one with no downsides.

> so it's mysterious to me why people are so vehemently against one with no downsides

Humans have millions of years of evolution searing into their DNA the impulse to socialize with other humans.

I think you're underestimating the effect of completely obscuring the face - how people indicate subtle social cues, emote, and communicate.

This ignores that masking is a nuisance, I don't care what other people say: they're virtue-signalling, Stockholm syndrome victims in my opinion.

Breathing fresh air, unabated, is one of the greatest pleasures in life.

> Everyone has the right not to catch a potentially deadly disease.

Nobody has this right. This positive right has never existed. And for good reason. It leads to all manner of evils taken to the extreme.

Some people think that knowingly exposing someone to HIV should be a serious crime (I don't know if it presently is in any jurisdiction; I'm fairly certain there have been attempts to pass such laws at least).

Is this an example of the positive right that you say never existed and leads to all manner of evils?

Do you think the proponents of it are uniformly politically aligned with the people in favor of masks for COVID?

In the context of COVID we’re actually talking about unknowingly exposing someone to a virus. So I don’t think it’s directly comparable.

Anyway, I don’t believe in throwing someone in jail for such an act. Some people do.

But I don’t think that invalidates the point that such a right does not exist, because “spread disease” is a superset of “knowingly spread disease”.

Ironically here in California it is legal to knowingly spread AIDS to someone, because democrats, yet that same political faction thinks that you are responsible if you unknowingly spread COVID-19 to someoen. (As an aside the absurd “infecting Grandma in the grocery store” doesn’t happen anyway because that’s not really where COVID spreads but I digress)

The theory behind universal masking rests on early studies which indicated a possibility of asymptomatic spreaders.

This has mostly been falsified in at least one controlled study [1].

The Danish study is the closest thing we have to RCT on masking [2] which found no statistically significant result from universal masking.

Wearing a mask while symptomatic seems like a good idea though, if you're unable to stay home for some reason, though that's good advice for most airborne contagious illnesses. I appreciated the culture of doing this when I was in Japan - if for no other reason than it told me who to keep my distance from.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4695

[2] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/m20-6817