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Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

You're implying that you'd go to jail for the lives of 4 people (or that people should), but recent experience has shown people won't even wear a mask to save other people's lives.

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Yes, people are shitty utilitarians. I can think of a thousand equally egregious examples that we're both guilty of. Doesn't mean we wouldn't be good people when presented with a social situation that our culture and instincts actually prepared us for.

Think about how many people have sacrificed themselves for others. Not just jail time, but death. Would each of those people have lived completely pure, selfless lives if they hadn't done what they did? Probably not. Who knows, some might have ended up being anti-maskers. It is said that "dying is easy". Making one clearly right choice, damn the extreme consequences, is actually very normal for humans. Just as normal as spending a whole life making bad decisions. Even more bizarre is the two "modes" aren't even mutually exclusive.

Is there any proof wearing a mask save ANY lives? People talk about this as if it were some fact, it's usually same people believing safe and effective vaccines, who quickly forgot vaccines were supposed to stop transmission, stop symptoms, they just keep pushing goal posts, while reality if you look at stats in highly vaxxed countries is that vaccines do really nothing anymore.

Vaccines decrease the severity of disease.

Numbers of vaxxed vs unvaxxed hospitalized (per capita in same group) don't confirm this disinformation spread by pharma companies and their paid politicians.

Can you share a source? Here's a quick one I found that shows the opposite: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

Here is for instance data directly from Czech gov

https://www.mzcr.cz/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/IS_COVID19_Ti...

Page 5, new hospitalizations, 7 day numbers per 100K people in each group June 2022 unvaxxed 1.4/100K vaxxed unfinished 1.3/100K vaxxed 2 doses 0.5/100K vaxxed with booster 1.7/100K

To be fair most of these people are hospitalized for other reason than COVID regardless their vaccination as was always the case even when they were spreading propaganda about hospitalized unvaxxed. Numbers in ICU look better for vaxxed, but there are way too many factors to consider, you are more likely to have better life style as vaxxed risk group than unvaxxed risk group, which doesn't really say vaccination works.

You spread a lot less virus if you wear a mask. Cheap masks don't protect you, but they do protect others from you. Countries where everybody immediately wore masks had far less cases than those where a lot of people didn't. The whole mask issue was the ultimate test in altruism: do you accept slight inconvenience that might save other people's lives? A lot of people failed.

Masks work only in the lab when worn PROPERLY at ALL ocassions, never meeting strangers without mask, good luck with that. In real life people have to eat without mask and they won't wear it at home or often in work etc. or they don't wear them properly anyway with gaps around.

So yeah, masks work in theory, but reality shown us they are completely useless, especially with newer more infectious variants. If they were such great invention we would not have flu and other respiratory viruses, in the end everyone will get infected anyway.

They are only useless when half the people don't use them and ignore all other measures while they're at it. Obviously there's no need to wear it at home; that's just stupid. But outside, in public space, it catches a lot of those particles that can carry the virus. If everybody wears one, that means less virus particles in the air, and less chance of infection.

And during the pandemic, a lot of countries did indeed not have their usual flu season.

They should have made the mask issue one of the tests. Do you let 4 people die, or do you choose to save them but wear something uncomfortable?

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