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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors.

similarly, most natural gas is used for power generation and industrial processes. in the US, only ~15% is used residentially, and most of that is for home heating, water heating, and clothes drying. about 1/3 of our national energy use is derived from natural gas, so you're on the order of 1% (or less) of national energy being consumed by natural gas cooking. it's a tiny problem in the energy pollution mix.

we'd be much better served in this regard by focusing all our efforts on reducing carbon pollution from electricity production and transportation, which accounts for well over half of the problem, not a tiny slice like gas cooking because it's a "small sacrifice".

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I'm reminded of fluorine chemistry. Back in the days before the Montreal Protocol you could get all sorts of halofluorocarbon starting materials for pennies because they were byproducts of CFC manufacture. But nowadays cost is prohibitive, a 100 g can of CF2Br2 will set you back hundreds because it's a specialty chemical and the paperwork is outrageous. It's a genuinely small sacrifice for most, but for a select few there's great cost.

SF6, CFCs, etc. The increased costs fixed the problem: labs now use closed loops instead of purging to atmosphere daily. Same story with helium, though not for environmental reasons. That's the system working.

> 99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors.

You'll have to do better than that. Yes, outdoor use was probably a waste of time. I would also say it was worth doing until we had data. But then, what else? Outdoor use is just a fraction. How do you get from that to 99%?

pretty much all public mask wearing was performative rather than effective. even indoors, besides care settings (hospitals, nursing homes) and social-focused venues (bars, clubs), most of the work was being implicitly done by distancing. almost no public venue was dense enough that casual proximity was more than an exceedingly remote risk (lightning strike level). most risk was with friends & family in private spaces, and those are overwhelmingly the least likely around whom you’d mask, but where it would have had real mitigative effect. instead, we masked outdoors and at the grocery store because of a wrongheaded focus on strangers in public spaces rather than familiars in private spaces, resulting in 99% useless safety theater.

Also, where I live it is permitted to wear fabric face masks that do not protect against the virus. They do stop drops of sneeze granted. I think those type of masks are useful for reminding others to keep their distance more than they are for actually protecting against the virus.

It's not that easy to distance properly in a grocery store when people keep moving around and there isn't good airflow.

And if you live with someone it's pretty hard to avoid spreading sickness with just a mask.

What percentage of transmission do you think happened between friends and family that don't live together?

And you didn't even mention the workplace, which I would expect to be a huge issue and also a big chunk of mask use.

It's possible that the things you're saying are right but you need a lot more evidence of transmission rates in different situations.

you don't need to keep perfect distance everywhere. transmission risk, at an individual level, is a function of both time and (the inverse of) distance[0]. if distance is short and time is short, as at the grocery store, risk is still miniscule. if distance is short and time is long, which is the likely case for social interactions in private spaces, then risk rises, which is why that's the place where masking can have some mitigative effect, but because social norms act against masking, that's where most transmission happens, not between strangers (outside of care settings and social-focused venues). airflow is at best a second-order (and probably weaker) effect, but volume (e.g., outdoors) dominates it because volume multiplies the effects of both time and distance.

in a similar vein, at the office, only large meetings are really a potential problem (for which you can mask or teleconference), but not appropriately-spaced meetings or sitting at a desk with appropriate distance to the next person. for retail workers in potentially close contact with a large number of the public daily (time elongated through multiple people), then a mask can have mitigative effect, but patrons can just distance from each other.

[0]: note also that the virus decays as a function of time, on the order of minutes outside the body.

> 99% of mask usage was wasteful and pointless safety theater, like wearing them outdoors.

False. Wearing masks is a very simple, safe way to reduce spreading your infection to others [1].

Please stop spreading misinformation.

1. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...

false, distancing is even simpler and more effective in a wider variety of situations, and suffers from none of the inane identitarian signalling to boot. stop spreading misinformation.

Social distancing is another example of a sacrifice that people were unwilling to make. Though I wouldn't call it minor.

You can do both. The only identitarian signaling I see in this thread is your post with it's view on people who simply think it's reasonable to wear a mask, even outside.

control-f for "outdoor" in your source: 0 results

I honestly can not even wrap my head around why they included the word "outdoor" in their original comment since outside use is such a miniscule portion of mask usage that I have no idea how it could meaningfully contribute to the 99% figure. I didn't really take it to be sincere, maybe more of an accidental strawman. So I guess I just ignored it.

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