How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a mask most of the time when in public?
I tried it for a year and it's dehumanizing. Not sure how you'd rate that vs the unknown chance of long covid but I've made my choice.
It's not quite free; the bridge of my nose sometimes experiences some irritation, and we've had to deal with more than a hand full of hateful/snarky in person comments, but that's no biggie.
Being from the south, we smile when we pass each other on the street. You can’t do that in a mask. Maybe you folks from NYC and SF don’t miss that—after all you can still glare at people with hostility wearing a mask—but it’s a major loss in quality of life for the rest of us.
Professionals wearing masks in specific contexts is different than advocating for ordinary people to wear masks in public settings.
So you effectively just insulted like 1.5 billion asians who've been wearing masks for years?
I'd call it humanizing. I care for others so I put on the mask.
Or just skip to what you really mean, tell your doctor who is going to operate on your or your child that you do not think they work.
Moron.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Perhaps to some. That feeling is probably largely driven by one's overall outlook.
We started masking before any of the mandates because it just made sense to do so, to us at least.
> It never ever should never have been mandated, only recommended.
That's a hard question in my opinion. I naturally tend toward letting people do what they want unless they're clearly hurting others. Others have argued that masking does unambiguously reduce harm to others, but I don't find it so clear cut.
I'm personally less uncomfortable with mask mandates than the widespread shutdowns. Those shutdowns caused massive harm to people. Masking? Not so much.
Note I'm not quite willing, even now, to fully support mask mandates, now or previously. I see both sides of the issue.
> It’s sad you get downvoted.
Agreed, it is sad that opposing, perhaps uncomfortable viewpoints get pushed down.
Why do you think this? I see someone wearing a mask and I see someone with enough respect for their fellow man that they don't want to get them sick. That's not fear or control, that's compassion. I don't think compassion is uniquely human, but it still is humanizing.
Maybe a little fear would be healthy for some people if it makes them act in a socially integrated manner. Anybody who's had covid probably doesn't want to get it again.
And you don't want to do it because you can't see every X person who caught the virus dropping dead in front of you, since all negative consequences happen out of sight and come back at you with statistics months later you simply can't bring yourself to care, that's all.
Wearing mask is as revolting as sex against one's natural "orientation". If someone thinks this is unreasonable and one should "get help" to "fix" it, I remind them that they may be fighting against strongly held "identity" belief. "Conversion therapy" is being declared evil, for some valid reasons. And I won't even say how I feel about forced, mandatory mask wearing.
I can be sold on the idea that covering one face (by any means) removes a lot of communication and social clues that are inherently human.
But control?
Covering your face, as a primate, is not a natural thing to do. Our brains have huge areas dedicated to recognition of subtle differences in facial features. We're literally wired for facial recognition. More than almost any other feature of our bodies, our faces define us as individuals.
Assuming that obscuring the face has zero cost is clearly wrong. I honestly can't believe I have to say this out loud.
How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?
Talking about cost without normalizing for probability of prevention is meaningless yet you want to frame the discussion to be purely about (low) cost of wearing masks.
We had a year of a pretty tough lockdown, most people wearing masks, distancing in grocery shops, restaurants and "non-essential" shops and companies closed, no public events, work from home, most people staying at home etc.
And yet people were getting sick with covid, even those wearing masks.
Masks alone won't protect you from covid. Even pretty hard core isolation might not protect you.
We basically have no idea how effective just wearing masks is. It surely reduces the probability but by how much?
Feel free to wear masks and hard hats but don't pretend you know for sure it's a rational choice.
For me the costs aren’t just wearing a mask or getting sick. I also have vulnerable people in my life. My partner, their partners, my elderly parents, friends with unknown connections.
If I walked around the grocery store without a mask I could at any time pick up the virus and even if I don’t get very sick I could give it to friends or loved ones. So then there is a mental load of worrying if I’m feeling fatigue due to poor sleep or onset of the virus (which is how it happened when I actually had it), and wondering if I should cancel social plans when I’m not feeling 100% normal.
If I am always wearing masks in public I can relax about it more when seeing friends. I’m being responsible and while accidents do happen I’m at least not being negligent.
I notice a lot of people not masking are only talking about themselves. It’s like they don’t think about how transmitting the illness affects others.
> How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?
But wait, that's a very different question. The original comment was "I'd rather be sick for 2 weeks than wear a mask every day." You're not saying that you'd rather be killed by a falling brick than wear a hardhat every day, surely.
If I learned anything from COVID times, it's that attributing deaths is complex, and roughly up to whoever writes the death certificate
My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19 infection. Or senior technical members of silicon valley companies you've heard of that are so brain fogged that they are incapable of doing anything like the work they did previously.
Yes, the prior paragraph is anecdotal, strong as it may be. Fortunately scientific studies are starting to gain some understanding of long covid.
Compare all this to the risks associated with wearing masks.
There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?
> There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?
Said masks were generally worn temporarily, not all day, every day, for a job. When worn for long periods of time, before COVID, OSHA actually had forbade it unless there was air filtering and frequent replacement (minimum daily). The way we wear masks, without filtering and with (in practice) no frequent replacement, would have been illegal to compel any person to do a few years ago, let alone study the safety of.
Edit: Also, on that note, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/. It's a long-study on the actual, real-world risks of mask-wearing. It's not concerned with risk/benefit, only the risk side of it, but it shows that masks are far from the risk-free preventative measure we pretend they are. If you already had COVID, looking at what they document (and this is the NIH, remember), it may be worse for your health to continue masking.
