As an analogy, I'd explain it like this. What if in the process to encourage people to wear seatbelts, drivers who did that then felt entitled to drive even faster thus resulting in even worse accidents and more frequent ones at that. Of course, no driver would actually think like that.
While I wear my mask, I do wonder about its overall effectiveness especially if in total we all engage in riskier behavior that we wouldn't have otherwise if we simply lived with the basic fear that you have to stay away from everyone.
Masks "help", but maybe they "help" most by thinking of them as not a help at all. It's a tough paradox to encode into public health messaging.
As a counter, my intuition is that masks also remind people of the risks and actually encourage safe behavior. I feel this in myself, a greater awareness of the pandemic, a nudge towards being more careful. Extending your analogy, it's as if the seatbelt reminded people that there are some pretty grisly accidents out there, and maybe they should take it easy.
Both effects probably exist, not sure what wins out, and how much it matters.
It doesn't.
There’s your answer then
fwiw, I wear a mask when I HAVE to go out for groceries, and avoid going out on unnecessary errands (shopping, dining out)
even if it encourages risky behavior, there's no evidence that it does it enough to translate to higher spread overall, which is what matters. As long as the net impact doesn't increase transmission, they're not a problem.
The worst neighborhoods for COVID over the summer were ones that were known for poor mask compliance, anyway.
Looking at it another way: I don’t smoke because I don’t want to risk pulmonary disease. Am I hurting the economy?
I don’t expect everyone to care about my life (maybe I’ll cause a blip in some chart) - but I do above almost everything else.
1. Hospital Capacity: Economic shutdowns have been largely to manage Hospital capacity since if all the hospitals in an area are overwhelmed, the death toll will grow since patients suffering any kind of acute issue will have nowhere to turn
2. The spread of disease (COVID-19): This is what is trying to be controlled by encouraging people to perform effective steps to limit the spread (with a second-order effect of reducing demand on the hospital) -- that is, if less people get the disease, less people die from the disease, and we can get a vaccine program and have an overall lower casualty rate from COVID-19.
Both of these strategies do not have to be employed.
For example, in the case where there's no effective vaccine in the near future, it might make sense to simply ensure that everyone gets infected at a slow enough rate that Hospital Capacity is not critical. This is because with this pandemic, over a long enough timeline (and again, without an effective vaccine), everyone will get the disease eventually. So in this scenario you are simply concerned about managing hospital capacity, and your tools are masks, social distancing, and economic shutdowns -- no need to track the infection, etc. Some locales are using this approach, and shutting down hot-spots without too much focus on how the disease is spreading, but most developed countries are tracking the spread much more closely and can be more targeted with the guidance. This was likely the initial thinking of many people, and why a shutdown did not occur before disease had spread widely.
On the other hand, if you assume a compliant population a near total economic shutdown to for a short period of time, with strict social distancing and containment measure to ensure that there is no spread, along with no new individuals, and a strong track-trace policy, then you can eradicate the cases with minimal masks. This is basically what China did, as far as I understand it. This was the initial model other locales tried to implement when they went into "Lockdown"-mode, but were not as successful, also -- again, from my limited understanding as a lay person.
On a third hand, if we assume we are going to have an effective vaccine in the near future (which was FAR from certain when this whole thing played out) it makes more sense to do both in concert -- that is, primarily limit the total number of people infected (masks and social distancing; this is because the long term outcomes of people afflicted with COVID-19 are unknown, limit that unknown risk) with a secondary task of managing Hospital capacity to prevent things from becoming catastrophic. This is sort-of where most locales have landed at the moment: Mandate masks (slow the spread) and shutdown hot-spots as they are detected (manage hospital capacity).
Masks alone don't cause the widespread panic, mass media did their part.
Nobody here panicked in February, or the first week of March. We were more or less going about our daily lives like normal, because that's what the state health people told us to do. Nobody wore masks, nobody social distanced.
By April 1st, NYC was seeing 500 deaths a day and increasing. It's the largest mass casualty event in NYC since 9/11, and was much worse, in body-count terms. It was comparable to the 1918 flu epidemic.
https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20200821/exce...
Of course, a NYC-level of mass death is absolutely not guaranteed to happen elsewhere. Different populations, different habits, luck- there's variables. But do not tell me that it's media hysteria when you didn't listen to ambulance sirens for a month.
But it is scientifically proven to limit the rate of the spread, which is the least I can do to protect myself and those around me.
I don't care if I get covid ... I don't think it will kill me based on my vitals. However, we don't fully understand the long term physical and mental health implications of having it (both neurological and psychological), we don't understand it from a 'pre-existing condition' standpoint, and hey who knows it could hit me like a train and do me serious harm or kill me. Plus, I would like to further the goal of eliminating the virus entirely, and not spreading it to others helps that.
I can't believe there are still people out there clamoring to the idea that there is any other way.