Ask HN: Is masking indoors like buying insurance for your brain?
If you buy home and car insurance, why not also "buy" brain insurance via masking indoors?
Hospitals that stopped requiring facemasks earlier didn't have higher rates of disease spread than those that continued to require them.
I'm not sure what the math is here but wearing a mask is a fairly high on my personal inconvenience scale. As far as daily non pandemic life, I'm not sure how much benefit there is.
I've got kids in school and so on, I'm going to be exposed to some extent. Is a lower level of potential exposure going to do me any good?
It's all risk mitigation.
And there is a cost, in time, annoyance, lack of being able to speak clearly, glasses fogging... The cost is small, but not zero. The benefit is not zero, but arguably small. Bigger than the cost? Most people don't think so.
But even if they don't have a mortgage, it's still a completely different tradeoff. You can't use "people get home insurance" to draw conclusions on "people should mask indoors". Different risks, different costs, different tradeoff.
Masking affects every minute of your waking life, and those you physically interact with. That every-second transaction cost is too high for most, unless immunocompromised. Only ill-conceived mandates make it otherwise, and almost everyone hated them.
Using wheelchairs would prevent falls for young, healthy, normally abled people. The nuisance factor, efficiency, etc., though, imposes too high a cost for the marginal gain from reduced fall injuries.
At best it makes an "i am a radical leftist" statement.
Tell me, do you wash your hands?
But also, even if healthy, maybe they're immunocompromised.