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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

> 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%?

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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.

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