Yet you were still a murderous bigot if you didn't wear one.
Even if this meta-analysis was available during the peak of the pandemic, refusing to wear masks while knowing there is as much reason to believe they work as there is to believe they don’t still paints a pretty unflattering picture of the person making that decision, considering the relatively low cost (across all notions of cost) of just taking the precaution until we have more solid info.
This remains true even if we prove down the road that masks did/do nothing.
That isn’t to say that I endorse the social behavior or the absolutism displayed by both “sides” of this topic. That’s a separate issue that is orthogonal to the pandemic itself, and continues to unfold.
But perhaps by not masking, it shows the individual to be relatively un-cautious.
That’s really useful to know if you happen to be on the other end of the vulnerable spectrum.
The act of wearing a mask despite no policy would indicate greater caution, but the inverse is not obviously true.
It seems the existence of a masking policy, public knowledge about the implications of exposure, and the presumption that masks provide some mitigation are all things that are required to then make some conclusion about whether or not the unmasked person across the room is relatively un-cautious.
Not wearing a mask now is normal again.
Wearing is the more unusual case.
I thought you were arguing that not wearing paints and unflattering picture.
But I agree that isn’t the case any longer.
Apologies. Misunderstood timing.
If we learned tomorrow through some better study with more certain data that masks reduced deaths by X percent, I don’t think you could fairly claim that during the period of time without that information, behaving as if masks did nothing was the same as behaving as if they are effective.
The cost of betting wrong is asymmetrical in the two scenarios.
But consider actual masking practice, rather than the theoretical undertaking.
In practice, they are used in a way that legitimises closer contact (socialising, working, travelling, supporting) than would otherwise be appropriate.
At the point it matters, for example getting to see an elderly relative in hospital, masking isn’t effective enough that it should be counted. Yet it is.
If I was to make a bet, it would be that if masks are eventually identified as being useful, the confounding factor is exactly that they make us increase contact so much that it offsets their entire benefit.
You are seamlessly slipping from a claim of practice back to just a theory.
Those are fine things to speculate about, and lead to some interesting conversations, but these are not practical claims.
One could further speculate that the emotional needs of a deeply social species would have still overridden whatever guidance was given, and in a no-mask world the primary difference might be that some people mentally adjust for a greater degree of perceived risk (and still carry out their planned visit) than they otherwise would have.
If your bet is correct, I think it's necessary to consider more than one dimension of benefit when evaluating the overall scenario, e.g. the benefit of seeing one's loved ones one last time (and similar scenarios) needs to be considered when evaluating which policy would have been better (assuming the impact of a masking policy is roughly equal to the impact of a non-masking policy).
> There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.
> Who is the "believer" in your opinion? The one that after reading the above says "mask don't work" or the person that says "but, masks might still work"
In the face of known uncertainty, the only conclusions one can draw are ”masks might work” and “masks might not work”. The person who concludes “masks don’t work” based on this analysis alone did not understand the analysis.
The conclusion seems far closer to “we don’t really know”, than “masks do nothing”.