- Wore a shirt

- Turned on my headlights and used my turn signals

- Held on to my empty coffee cup until I got to a trash can when I could have just dropped it on the ground

- Kept my dog on a leash and picked up his poop

- Parked in a parking spot instead of conveniently stopping my car in the middle of traffic directly in front of the grocery store door

I’m sure there are plenty others. Being a member of society comes with a lot of privileges and a handful of obligations but it only works if we all do our part. No freeloaders, right?

Edit: An extra word

Where do you live where this is government mandated?

If the anti-maskers respected the rights of others around them as much as they insist on others respecting their rights, this would be nearly a non-issue.

I still insist you wear chaps on top of pants or your short trousers. Pants are fashion, chaps protect.

I really don't think people have changed in 100 years, they will always complain. We just need to do it anyways.

Generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the case of masks, I want to see very strong evidence that masks are very necessary, and other approaches wouldn't have similar or better results with lower change to human tradition. So far, I haven't seen that at all. The scientific evidence that masks are effective or necessary is weak. Alternate approaches (eg. wearing a mask if you're symptomatic, staying at home if you're symptomatic) may be just as effective.

The examples you cite have roots in human tradition, and have been established for many years, mostly with strong evidence.

At least in those cases, that “freedom” usually kills only them when things go wrong.

But even so, we can consider seatbelts as a necessary wearable/accessory for car use, which is also a recent development (cars and driving). Masks are different in that they affect people going on about doing things people did for millenia without requiring a mask.

It contrasts with professed love of freedom, but humans are always creatures of paradox.

Killing someone is not a scientifically substantiated harm either. Of course we harm the other person's health (that's objective), but that in itself is only bad in the sense that "life is good" and "we should respect life / not kill". And that is not a scientific argument but a moral one. The universe doesn't care either way.

That there's a scientific proof that harm is being done by an action.

But harm is a moral term, and science is not about moral judgements. It can help inform them, but the guidelines for what is "harm" or "good" come from morality ultimately.

E.g. what is "good for society" is based on a value judgement / decision by said society based on its goals, what it wants to conserve or change, etc.

Science can tell you that X technique is more productive for example. But whether "more productivity" is desired is a matter of social values/priorities, not a scientific matter.

There is however a long history and tradition of humans wearing clothing to cover their genitals. Even very primitive societies have this norm, and it has pretty obvious reasons behind it.

Instead of projecting arrogant puffery, why don’t you think about the potential consequences of prioritizing your comfort and self aggrandizement to people whose lives are put in danger.

I have a neighbor who unknowingly was infected early on and likely infected several of her elderly clients, most of whom are now dead. She is devastated... think about how you will feel if you did the same thing, without the innocence of being ignorant.

It is unethical to have a study with a control group which involves a live virus.

There is enough evidence that masks are effective that they should be required until it's proven they are ineffective or the virus risk is reduced.

This is the problem with arguments like this. It inevitably turns into a fight over who gets to pick the evidence and experts, as there is always reasoned disagreement.

Heck, China is an existence proof that mask wearing doesn't stop the virus in any meaningful way. Sample size, a billion. Checkmate. Are we done?

You're also assuming the Chinese numbers are reliable, etc etc. I mean there are just so many ways to slice it. Suffice it to say, COVID happened in China despite widespread mask wearing. If you want to prove masks work it'd take a much more rigorous analysis than cherry-picking countries and attributing their numbers to masks, that's my point.

Why?

Look I know we've all heard the Friedman quip about temporary government programs, but that refers to normal situations. It's one thing when a program might drop off the political radar and outlast its mandate by decades, but in the case of COVID-19, there is absolutely no way on Earth, at all, that people could just forget that it happened. If the COVID-19 pandemic were a war, it would already rank among the 50 deadliest ever.

Our rights are not devalued in the long term by rapid action in a pandemic which, by the best available estimates, could kill over a million Americans if left to run unchecked. They are not devalued in the long term because it is always going to be easy for people to know whether we are experiencing this kind of emergency. The loudest deniers on Facebook are not representative of the population: most Americans do recognize the threat, despite one of the largest disinformation campaigns in human history.

So what if there's a small chance we might be too strict about masks? It's not a large injustice, and it's not a slippery slope.

It very strongly depends on exactly how the mask requirement legislation works. If it's "all persons in a public in the state of California must wear a face covering until December 31, 2020. Failure to do so will result in a fine of no more than $150", that's probably fine. People will still complain, somewhat justifiably, that this legislation is safety theater rather than an actually useful law, but in the grand scheme of things it just wouldn't be that big of a deal. However, if it's "any person who knowingly performs an action which endangers the health or well-being of others is subject to a fine of up to $10,000 or 5 years in prison", we now have yet another law that most people are arguably in violation of at least some of the time, which allows bad actors in government to impose enormous pressure to comply with unreasonable or illegal demands under threat of large fines or jail time.

I personally worry quite a bit that something more like the second will be passed, and will be very selectively enforced.

There's no ethical way to do a control in a study of infectious diseases. You'd have to mandate that some study participants not wear masks, when your hypothesis is clearly they the masks will keep some of them from getting sick or dying.

You're asking for far too much here. Masks are known to stop disease spread from (literally) centuries of use. We don't have to throw all that intuition out with covid, even though the numbers may change.

And again: why should we have to prove this technique via completely impractical research constraints when it is very likely that it helps, in a situation of dire urgency.

Codifying morals is done for the purpose of having cheaper and fairer enforcement.

A mask is justified in the short term, the fact that you don't want to see my junk rates no higher than me not wanting to see your sportsball t-shirt. Unfortunately one of them is illegal and it isn't the sportsball t-shirt.

Without adjustments for other variables, the two intervention groups had about a 10% reduction in overall ILI incidence over the 6 weeks compared with the control group, but this was not statistically significant.

However, when the researchers analyzed the ILI rates for each week of the study and adjusted for other variables (age, sex, ethnicity, baseline hand washing practices, sleep quality, alcohol use, flu vaccination), they found that the FMHH group had significantly lower rates than the controls in weeks 4, 5, and 6 (35%, 44%, and 51%, respectively).

The adjusted rates for the mask-only group also were lower than those of the control group in weeks 4, 5, and 6, with reductions ranging from 28% to 42%, but this did not meet the authors' significance criterion of P<.025.

The authors say several factors may explain why a significant reduction in ILI was found only during the second half of the intervention period. One is that recruitment of students continued through the first 2 weeks of the intervention, increasing the sample size by 11%. Also, the proportion of FMHH participants who wore their masks more than the average 3.5 hours a day increased in the later weeks of the study, and confirmed flu cases on campus peaked in weeks 4 and 5.

I found that study from this meta study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20092668/ which reviews a lot of these studies for influenza. Note, however, that most of the studies only look at if the masks protect the individual, not whether masks stop the spread of influenza, but the evidence seems pretty inconclusive.

Results from weeks 4, 5 and 6 are interesting. Another study could see if this can be reproduced.