I agree with this. 100% mandatory outside of your home would mean I would have to wear a mask while running, which seems unnecessary when I see a grand total of 1 or 2 people on my entire run (and cross the street to keep plenty of distances between us).
This is one danger of applying a solution for 100% of everyone, everywhere without taking into account any nuances.
That said, mandating masks indoors + outdoors when you can't maintain 6 feet of distance seems like a no brainer. Perhaps in higher density areas it could be worth requiring them 100% of the time, even outdoors, but I'd like to see the data first.
Certainly I'm not wearing by myself in the woods. But perhaps that's seen poor practice by some. No idea what things look like in the city. Perhaps I'd find it uncomfortable.
My understanding is that is pretty much the situation even for places where that are relatively enforcing masking in the US.
Public health policy and individualised medicine are, or at least can be, vastly different things.
If you tell everyone they must wear a mast at all times, some people still will not.
If you tell everyone a more complex set of rules than masks at all times when out of your usual place of residence then people will fabricate all types of fictions that exempt themselves from the rues.
With that said, it appears that if there is any gray area in the rules then the general population is almost sure to abuse them. In this case, I think it's better to err on the side of caution and make it 100% mandatory so there is absolutely no gray area.
The mask order was extended to, basically, “wear a mask if you’re outside your house”. This includes exercising outside. Personally, I find that part a bit excessive; however, my understanding is that it’s meant to counter exactly what you pointed out: as long as there are any exceptions, some people will reason their way out of compliance. A 100% mandate is just easier and simpler to follow.
I now wear a mask when walking in my neighborhood after I noticed other people wearing masks too. Chalk it up to peer pressure I guess, but to me it’s a very small price to pay if it helps enforce mask-wearing in other contexts.
R0 is an ensemble average, not a useful metric for any given person. It's likely that transmission is wildly variable, and that superspreading events are major contributors to transmission. Basically, households slowly pass the disease between each other, and occasionally one person manages to get a shitload of people outside their household sick. Masks appear to be extremely effective at stopping the superspreading events, which has a huge effect on R0.
That's why there's this huge focus on masks stopping the spread by pre-symptomatic people, which is a highly dubious and never-before tried idea, for which basically no reliable evidence exists (masks pre-COVID being intended to stop you getting sick, not other people), and which is an absolutely pure form of virtue signalling. It's literally a highly visible sign that someone is suffering discomfort for someone else's health, except, that only works if you believe it's actually true.
Look at the Nordics. In Sweden there's no mask requirement because the epidemic is disappearing. In Norway they pointed out that given the tiny number of infected people, even if you assume masks work perfectly, 200,000 people would need to wear a mask constantly to stop one new infection. And this is a virus with an IFR of about 0.1% so you end up needing millions of people to wear masks constantly to stop just a single death, almost certainly of a person very close to the end of their life anyway.
The numbers just don't work, at all, once the epidemic has faded away. And as Sweden and other places shows it can fade away without any mask requirements.
If you don't give the virus a chance to spread, it cannot spread.
The problem is that in the US and elsewhere, people cannot seem to follow the social distancing and hygiene, so you need to find a way to physically distance people with masks and other protections.
To say that masks do not work, is untrue. There is a reason why doctors and others wear masks in their own professions.
By the way, when you say it is disappearing, that doesn't mean let the guard down. Look at what is happening in Vietnam. 100 days clean and they let their guard down and look at what is happening now.
However, the point stands. Sweden has not had particularly bad outcomes, being as it is in the middle of the pack, and with most deaths being in care homes where Sweden has many other severe problems, e.g. many staff who can't speak Swedish. In fact in one care home they ended up in a spot where none of the staff spoke Swedish causing problems for a resident who couldn't communicate with them to get food! So given Sweden's dependency on immigrant labour for care homes it's maybe not a surprise they've had problems protecting those homes. For the general population however, COVID has not been a problem.
You read the Survivors Groups on FB [0] and the real problem people aren't understanding is that this isn't quick death we need to worry about, it is the long term health effects that will lead to a lifetime of medical issues.
It gets weird because there are many non-closed spaces which are very crowded. Imagine a concert, or the boardwalk.
It sounds reasonable in closed spaces (like in the examples you gave). But I'm reluctant to wear a mask outside in low-density area (I would if there were strong evidence it made any difference).
> man with a dry cough, that was later diagnosed to be COVID, wore a mask on the long flight from Wuhan to Toronto, had extended/close contact with 25 people, but he was wearing a mask, and none of them contracted it from him [1]
I'm nitpicking here, but by itself it doesn't sound as a strong argument in favour of masks. If I understand correctly, without any containment measures, the propagation rate (R0) of the virus is around 3. Which means that a sick person is going to contaminate on average 3 other people. I suppose the average person can have quite a lot of interactions (starting with their family, colleagues) during the time they are contagious. So even without mask, it's not obvious the guy in the plane would have infected anyone else.
That being said, I agree with you that masks should be mandatory (in closed spaces).