But aren’t you actually agreeing with the US federal government’s actual response? Aren’t the people saying that you should wear masks the ones going against the grain here?

Doesn’t that make _you_ the obedient surf?

S[n]ide note: I live in Australia so I have no skin in this game. Along with NZ, we’ve had very few deaths from CV19 relative to large cities in the rest of the Anglosphere, and our economies are basically open. I suppose the “police state style intervention” you speak of did reduce our short term freedom - we had 3 months of hard lockdown - but I’m writing this from our summer holiday beach AirBNB, and it sure feels like freedom to me.