Haven't you just agreed with me?

The debate is whether they help by 0.001%, 99% or some number inbetween.

And until there's strong evidence then we're back to the precautionary principle (or as I like to put it "just shut-up and where your damn mask")

I agree with you in that I believe they work and, as a matter of personal choice, I followed the precautionary principle and wore a mask until I was vaccinated.

But I don't agree that "the precautionary principle" is sufficient justification for a government mandate. Clear evidence should be required to impose the mandate.

And my previous post was not agreeing with you; it implied that masks may work or may make things worse by trapping more virus particles inside the mask.

Another post here linked to a study that showed that certain kinds of masks can sometimes be worse than no mask, even ignoring the "trapping" factor, by actually increasing the droplet count in the air.

> But I don't agree that "the precautionary principle" is sufficient justification for a government mandate.

It is in many other realms. Why raise the bar for this?

This whole thing feels like whatever the equivalent is of "virtue signalling". Why have some groups decided to be so stubborn about this particular thing? It smacks of some identity thing.

I can't answer your very leading question, but there are PLENTY of people who wear masks, are vaccinated, and are scared of mandates, and are consistent about "raising the bar" across the board (For things besides COVID). They just don't get as much media coverage, because that position doesn't fit into a digestible narrative in today's zeitgeist.

Fair points. But some of this appears to be somewhat US specific. In other countries, the mask debate is more of a fringe issue compared to other broader aspects of COVID restrictions. From an outside perspective, masks seem to have taken on an unwarranted significance that might be peculiar to the US political discourse.

It's bizzare to me that it hasn't in other places. When you issue a mandate, it's automatically politicized. In a parallel universe this could have gone so much differently if, trump say, said "I'm not going to force you to wear masks, but please wear them".

To me it feels a bit like "I'm not going to do this thing because you've told me to. If you hadn't have told me then I might have done it but I'm damned if I'm going to now".

Which is fine when the public demonstration of a point of principle isn't as important as the thing itself. Otherwise it's a collective act of cutting of one's nose to spite one's face.

But maybe this is the part that is somewhat US specific. The relationship of the people to the government seems to have an almost mythic role in political identity - rather than a somewhat more pragmatic one that I recognize in the UK.

For obvious reasons US does have more of a 'uh we bootstrapped from from first principles' approach to political theory, the UK explicitly does not. I would argue that there are good and robust ways to do things in the former sort of a system, possibly ways that are even better than the latter, but I think the US polity has basically been a 250 year struggle to figure that out. I dunno, the US is not doing terribly, there have been some horrible mistakes, but that's to be expected, there are no sinless governments and societies as far as I can tell.

Napkin math would be:

90% of infected person virus stays in

90% of virus does not get in for a healthy person

So 1% (10% through * 10% through) of final particles will be inside the mask. Hence roughly 0.9% of particles (90% stays inside of the mask of the healthy person) would stick around by this logic

Vs 100% of particles that could enter will enter without any sort of mask

Even for napkin math we'd need reasonably good approximations, but we're missing a crucial number (how many virus particles are normally exhaled?) and I don't know if 90% blockage is accurate either (I'm just using it as an example because other posts in this thread have used that number).

> but we're missing a crucial number

Exactly. We're lacking a crucial number. So wear a mask.

Or refuse, and enhance the herd immunity, which is the only thing that will ever really slow the virus in the first place. (Like the flu and colds, this virus will be with us forever and cannot be eradicated, because unlike smallpox and the like, this one has both animal and human hosts...)

I rather think "let's go for herd immunity" is something we need to collectively decide. It's a huge decision and impacts everyone. Like many decisions with collective impact, we rightly restrict the rights of individuals to go their own way on it.

Obviously there isn't collective agreement for a mandate. Are you saying the government should impose a mandate without collectively deciding, or even debating?

That points to a tricky, general problem in political theory and one we've struggled with for millenia. I don't have an answer but I do think there's a middle ground between "authoritarian diktat" and "everyone does what the hell they want".