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I'm not sure I agree with the statement that the US has the "worst virus situation". It has some of the most cases, sure, if you compare it by population though, it's still high, but it's not horrible. The US is #12 for cases per capita, most European countries are between 4,000-6,000 cases per capita, while the US is at 8,500, which is definitely more. But fewer people die per capita than in the UK, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and some other minor countries. It isn't like the US has orders of magnitude more infections per capita, and there's more people dying per capita in many other major countries. In such countries you'd have about the same chance of catching the virus, and a greater change of dying, as in the US. The majority of people that are refusing to wear masks are doing so because they believe the science/data supports that decision. You might disagree with that, and whether the science/data actually supports it is a different discussion, but they aren't just being "childish" and refusing to follow recommendations for no reason. I think there's obviously political power to gain in making the situation look as bad as possible, so that a group can then use that as a foothold to advance their own political policies. It's unfortunate that the issue is so political already. But you can easily tell when it's happening when people are referring to "society failing" and needing to "reshape society" and saying how horrible it is in the US when it really isn't that bad, etc. You can't advance new politics without a narrative of the old way of things being bad. I guess you can easily argue that there's political power for me to downplay the situation and make it look as good as possible, in order to prevent new politics from advancing. And that's true. But it's good to at least share both sides of the story. |
That's beyond absurd. There isn't a single shred of evidence in support of not wearing masks helping the pandemic and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. Not only that, but common sense says that putting a barrier between your mouth / nose and infectious particles and thereby stopping some of them from entering your body can reduce the chances of one getting sick by lowering the amount of viral particles entering the body. People knew this in 1918. Now we have science to back this up and have had it for over a hundred years. It is complete idiocy to suggest that science doesn't support mask wearing.