This is a take against all laws if you prop it up a bit more. It doesn‘t make sense. The people enacting these laws are democratically elected. „Common sense“ in this case is not arbitrary. It is the culmination of the „common senses“ if all politicians that were elected by their citizens. This is not undemocratic, it is democracy in its purest form.

At some point in dire situations, as a government, you have to save your citizens from themselves.

That isn't direct democracy. That is a republican form of government. Whenever you have representatives instead of citizens governing themselves, you can have situations where the government saves the citizenry from themselves but also situations where the representatives exploit the government for themselves. Both cases have happened throughout history and are happening with the coronavirus.

In the US, Fauci was initially anti-mask to preserve supplies for health care officers. This theoretically saved citizenry from themselves but at the cost of long term trust in institutions.

Democrat led governments lengthened lockdowns for political gain. Republican led governments shortened lockdowns for political gain.

- Democrats point at the increased infection rates in Republican states as proof that lockdown measures are still necessary but ignore much lower death rates we are seeing.

- Republicans point to the economic devastation that lockdowns cause as cause to end lockdowns without proper planning to limit infection.

- Democrats push for very large stimulus over loosening lockdowns without discussing the long term costs of adding so much to the deficit and the long term costs to the economy.

- Democrats hoist blame at Trump but ignore how certain Democratic run states were some of the worst at initially handling the coronavirus.

- Trump overhypes the availability of vaccines and underplayed the virus.

Fair enough on most of those points, but I wouldn't blame democrats on the slow response. It just so happens that coastal urban centers are blue and were hit earlier and harder than anyone else.

The gravest political failures in regards to the pandemic have been the administration and a few of its most ardent political supporters. (Many republican governors have acted in good faith to protect their state). And that failure was not so much a failure to act soon enough, but a failure to listen to medical and scientific leadership and a propensity to meddle in the public health structure for political reasons.

I think both parties did that. The difference is mostly in the scale of their powers. The administration controlled the federal government and thus had both greater powers and a bigger microphone.

Governors controlled each state. You had Democratic governors and representatives acting just as badly. It is just that they had less scope to do damage. A governor can usually directly harm only their own state and not other states.

Some Republican governors opened lockdowns probably too quickly. Cuomo basically spread covid-19 into nursing homes by sending patients back into nursing homes. de Blasio resisted a NYC lockdown probably increasing its spread.

I would fault the administration on a lack of a coordinated response between the federal and state levels. I wonder if this was from a fear on being blamed for deaths and that they wanted to shift responsibility and blame onto states.

We live in a system with groups jockeying for political power. The groups continue to maintain power as long as they continue to convince enough of the populace to vote for them. They do this in various ways. One way is to form a coalition of subgroups and promising such subgroups favors. Another way is to convince the populace that they are all in it together. One favorite technique is to raise the spectre of an external enemy.

Some current enemies: China, global warming, coronavirus, immigrants, racism.

The longer you live, the more you see these techniques repeated over and over. The situations are rarely as the political parties make them out to be. The political parties mostly lie since entities that don't are disadvantaged at obtaining political power. People as a whole are too easy to manipulate so it is to your advantage to lie.

One thing to note is that the current situation is ripe for massive political power gains since so many things have been thrown into flux. That is why both sides are playing so hard right now. There is much power to be gained and that power will be locked in till the next big change.

When the vast majority of people agree that we should do something reasonable for the common good and you disagree loudly while flailing your arms about, then it doesn't make you a defender of liberty, it makes you an obnoxious moron.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. What a wretched subthread this spawned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Note the words "reasonable", here meaning "proportionate". We're not advocating mob rule here. We're asking you to wear a mask, not to kill your first-born.

COVID restrictions are way more than just masks though. In many jurisdictions, we’re requiring small businesses to remain shuttered while their competitors are allowed to remain open.

A small toy shop is closed. Meanwhile, Target and Walmart are allowed to sell toys in-person (and Amazon online). What’s going to happen to that toy-shop owner 6 months from now after everyone has been trained to shop at their competitors, after they’ve missed a Christmas season, and after they’ve got 6 months of back rent due? The shadow of COVID restrictions don’t end the first day the government graciously allows them to open their doors.

Many of the “solutions” (send a little money and let them delay rent payments) are answers maybe more fit for W-2 employees but not for business owners.

Yes, I agree. Not all restrictions are agreed upon, and for those issues that are not easy to balance, great care has to be taken.

This is exactly the situation Manchester is in right now. The UK government has put it into a higher level of lockdown this week, but without the same type of financial support from the previous lockdown. The local government has been fighting this tooth-and-nail, with good reason.

I'm talking about the "my rights" crowd and generally these issues don't overlap with those.

Just wear a mask, eh? Tell that to the entire cinema industry. Tell that to the 89% of the hospitality industry in NYC that can’t pay rent.

Mask mandates are actually the least authoritarian and least enforced thing the US has done. We’re limiting actual constitutional rights, selectively, to stop the spread of covid. Despite the fact that we effectively flattened the curve months ago.

I was in the middle of treatments when lock downs started. Then I lost Access to all my doctors. Thankfully things worked out eventually, but had some bad scares.

So yea, Lockdowns put me personally at risk. And since I have young daughters that puts them at risk for being homeless.

That is not what religious people believe.

And there has been far more genocide that is secular-based

It funny you mentioned this because the "science and data" overwhelmingly supports wearing a mask to cut transmission, which is also a major factor in why a overwhelming majority of people support wearing one.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/36/eabd3083

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-08-oxford-covid-19-study-f...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/

https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8#ref-CR4

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768532

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0203/v3

Who would have guessed that most people are reasonable and take heed of doctors and scientists?

Why have democracy at all if you don't believe our collective ability to make good choices most of the time?

What's telling is that in your original post, you stated: > Why did it take months for the government to be recommending face masks?"

But all of these links you posted are dated after the April 3 recommendation by the CDC for the public to wear masks. https://www.livescience.com/cdc-recommends-face-masks-corona...

"Based on the best evidence available at the time, it was not deemed that that would have a significant impact on whether or not a healthy person wearing a mask would contract COVID-19," Adams said."

There's not a single western industrialized nation or state that can be pointed to now as a mask success story. There were a few countries in eastern europe (specifically czechia) that were heralded as a primary reason for controlling covid in the spring.

We now know that this apparent good result was not because of masks, but because of geography. Czechia is ranked #1 in the world in cases / million in the last week and #3 in deaths / million (and its numbers are still climbing). Every single eastern european nation had low cases/deaths in the spring and now all of them are having their first large surge.

It's abundantly clear that cloth masks, as a whole, do not play a major role in how the virus spreads in a country.

Thank you for this. I knew 93% of Americans support masks and we're about to enter a third wave in America.

I didn't realize masks were that ineffective in other countries as well.

Opinion pieces? The first link is a study that measured the amount of droplets that each mask type blocks using optical equipment.

If you actually looked at each of the other links, you'd noticed that they were all valid.

I just picked the first one as an example of how seriously we should take your words at.

Now you start going on a tangent with meta-analysis of statistical data, comparing Sweden with America with no appreciation of the difference in the culture, lifestyle and handling of the coronavirus and then attribute their relatively good performance just to the lack of a mask mandate?

Give me a break, man.

You are going to have to go way back in the medical literature to find many peer reviewed studies on masks.

For the same reason it might be hard to find recent studies proving that blood letting is not efficacious.

It's basic physics and statistics. A germ of a certain size can only fit through a certain size whole. Masks of any type will reduce the number of particles and thus reduce your chances of contracting. Same goes for your statistical likely hood of spreading to others.

Like I just said it's clear that masks stop particles. That part is obvious.

What's not clear is if applying a plague vector directly on your face with a virus that remains active on surfaces for days is efficacious.

Is it efficacious at the community level?

It's basic epidemiology. You could be more pro-science and consider these things.

Here's a study from the original SARS epidemic showing that people who had known contact with infected people there was a 70% lower chance of infection when they wore masks[1]. At this point, arguing that masks don't work is absolutely taking the piss -- you only need to look at countries like Japan (which made the political decision to not do widespread lockdowns unlike many other countries in Asia) to see that widespread mask usage clearly works.

> Supporting the validity of this finding, there was a dose-response effect: by multivariable analysis, persons who always wore masks had a 70% lower risk of being diagnosed with clinical SARS compared with those who never wore masks, and persons with intermittent mask use had a 60% lower risk. Many persons who wore masks in the community did not use N-95 or similar highly efficient filtration devices, which have been recommended for use in the hospital setting.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322931/

Did you read that study? Or did you just read the first paragraph summary? I'm seriously asking. Because if you read that study...which is a SURVEY of 100 or so people.. you would clearly not be using that as your bulletproof evidence that masks work.

Did you just read the title?

"""At this point, arguing that masks don't work is absolutely taking the piss""'

Fanatical beliefs with no evidence?

Is Corona a cult?

I look at countries like Sweden and Norway and know that masks mandates don't work.