Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfblah | Hacker News Reader

The mask thing was all theater and political logrolling. Beyond it being anti-science, three other concerning factors:

* It decreased trust in government by backing a policy that most now understand wasn't science-based.

* It increased the partisan divide in the country for no benefit by encouraging people on both sides to label those on the other side as "nutters."

* It probably caused some amount of real harm by causing people to think that, if they wore a mask, they were protected. This probably meant some elderly and immunocompromised people put themselves at risk when they could have avoided the risk by staying outdoors.

View on HN

The most embarrassing part is that it started off by declaring that the science was against masks, and silencing all dissenters; then moved to declaring the effectiveness of masks, demanding their universal use, and silencing all dissenters.

The problem is with the official silencing, not with masks. You can't even figure out whether masks work when you can't trust any of the sources of information to not be some sort of partisan religious police. The hydroxychloroquine fraud being published in the Lancet is something that political, wedge issue science will never recover from. It was like an awful sequel to the Wakefield incident, and a one-two death blow to the general acceptance of vaccines writ large. Now people will just believe the studies that their political party tells them to believe.

Yes, these are all valid points. One question would be, given that masks likely have little effect, what should governments do? My view would be they should not encourage such an intervention, as it lowers faith in institutions, which is most of what your second paragraph is pointing out.

You're throwing in a truly decadent load of assumptions in a few short words before you make your points. Just because you can craft rhetoric that is tiring to untangle does not mean it has any merit.

People should try to find interventions that work. If masks worked reliably, and there were evidence behind that, I'd be a big supporter.

There is _better_ evidence around N95 masks in hospital settings. But that's not the typical masking situation. At my kids' school, everyone wore surgical masks. It's pretty easy to demonstrate that virons pass through and around those masks with relative ease.

> If masks worked reliably, and there were evidence behind that, I'd be a big supporter.

Masks do work reliably, and there is plenty of evidence behind that. Maybe you only trust biased sources that say otherwise, I don't know, but your comment is pretty much calling N95 masks snake oil, and that's nonsense.

Why do you think that suggesting to wear a mask during a global pandemic was "all theater"?

If you had to go into an ebola ward, and someone handed you a mask, would you really refuse to wear it?

Where I live (Alameda County, California), people were required by law to wear a mask outdoors when within 30 feet of another person. This was not merely a "suggestion" and it was enforced.

My decision about ebola would be based on whether masks are effective or not. I haven't researched the topic.

We're far, far beyond the point where we have to question or wonder if wearing an air filter in an infectious disease ward will decrease your chances of catching the disease. Maybe you personally really don't know, but maybe you're being willfully ignorant, I don't know you.

If you refused to wear the mask, the very serious and educated people at the door of the ebola ward would likely refuse you entry to the ebola ward, which is probably all for the better anyway.

In every public place I visited during the pandemic, the official rules stated you could leave your mask down if you were eating or drinking. This included two of the largest hospitals in Colorado. In bars and restaurants you only had to wear a mask if you were standing up, and at all other times you were allowed to eat, drink, laugh and talk unmasked. On airplanes everyone unmasked while eating meals.

If masking was truly primarily about stopping the spread of a highly contagious airborne virus, why were the rules designed and applied to allow people to spend so much time in confined spaces unmasked?

The original comment claimed that the suggestion to wear a mask was "all theater" during a pandemic, because masks don't actually protect people.

The proposition was "wearing a mask is all theater", but your comment is explaining how not wearing a mask in particular situations was theater.

Wearing the mask is not theater, it's an effective mitigation.

Taking the mask off in an enclosed space and pretending you're safe is the theater part, but that isn't what OP was talking about.

Like the OP, I'm just pointing out that the masking requirements set out by governments and institutions at all levels were highly theatrical in nature, and I gave some concrete examples. Do you disagree? For example, the requirement by local governments to wear masks in restaurants only while standing... Do you think that had any practical "non-theatric" value?

> The mask thing was all theater and political logrolling

And yet every government around the world from all political persuasions pushed for mask wearing.

Wonder how you reconcile this with your intellectually lazy and factually baseless "this was all for partisan reasons" rhetoric.

You're very close to understanding hegemony.

You would have to be completely ignorant of world affairs to think all of the countries in the world act in unison.

... Sweden enters the chat.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Pretty sure Sweden didn't ban mask, you could still use them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com