I find that many of the mandates are "feel good assumptions" rather than actual science. Take masks on airplanes, there have been 0 outbreaks of Covid as a result of a flight, and for good reason. Airplanes have heavy duty HEPA filters that will filter all the air in the cabin every ~3-4 minutes. On the one hand the science says that masks won't really do a damn thing on airplanes but we mandate them because its a "feel good assumption", when you walk on the airplane and see everyone wearing a mask, it makes you feel safer, even though it's not actually any safer.

Same goes for social distancing. I heard somewhere that the initial number was 10FT. But then businesses complained that it would be unfeasible so they voted by committee and reduced it to 6FT.

The last example I bring is in restaurants. I was recently in Hawaii and the rule is, if you are sitting down you don't need to wear a mask but if you are standing up you must wear a mask. Now I get why the rule is there and I'm not complaining about it, but think of how stupid this rule is from a scientific perspective.

At most, it's good information to have for those particularly vulnerable to COVID. Depending on one's vulnerability profile, N95 masks, or masks of any kind, can be wasteful and even harmful to the environment. For myself, my chance of getting seriously ill or death from COVID-19 is effectively 0%. SARS-CoV-2 is endemic, and I've had it twice, so I'm not gonna keep forking over my money for masks, especially N95s.

But yeah, if we didn't have sufficient research on the effectiveness on masks by now, then the medical establishment has failed at its job. The CDC is supposed to control diseases, and yet masks were somehow a mystery decades after their inception? Wow.

Why exactly should anyone have faith in these people?

> I absolutely love that these things were mandated before “the science” could somehow prove they worked

When threatened with a new virus which spreads through respiratory system it is a common sense to start covering nose and mouth. Especially when there's a copious amount of evidence that masks work for reducing infections in case of other respiratory deceases.

I think we should speak more about how a political bias takes precedence over the survival instinct. That's what does kill people.

The science has been very clear:

* masks don't work

* masks don't work and they harm you

* surgical masks and better work

* cloth masks, surgical and better all work and here's how to make one out of a tshirt

* cloth masks don't work, only surgical and better

* surgical masks don't work, only N95 and better

* ...

* (predicted) type 2-6 hazmat suits don't work, only type 1 work.