[CivBase]

> Your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins.

I keep seeing this analogy when it comes to masks and COVID-19, but I don't think it's a great one. The difference between me punching your face and not wearing a mask is risk and intent.

The overwhelming majority of people do not intend to transmit any virus to those around them. It's pretty difficult to punch someone in the face without intending to harm them.

We also cannot avoid risking harm to someone else. Despite my best efforts, I risk hurting someone every time I sit behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. However, there are clearly some risks that are too great. If I punch you in the nose, it's a pretty sure thing you will be harmed. But if I do not wear a mask in a public space... the odds aren't particularly bad on any single outing.

What makes the mask thing really troublesome is pinning down just what the risks of transmission are with and without masks over an extended period of time in a variety of normal scenarios. I've seen enough to personally conclude that wearing a mask in public spaces is probably a good idea if I cannot avoid public spaces altogether. It's just hard to convince everybody that masks are effective enough at reducing risk - and that the risk is great enough to warrant the (very minor) sacrifice of freedom - to mandate them without also overstating their effectiveness.

I stand by the gist of your argument, though. There is a significant difference between risking harm to yourself and risking harm to those around you. I just wanted to address that analogy since I've been seeing it everywhere and I think it oversimplifies the conflict.

[toomanyrichies]

I appreciate your counter-argument. Let me address intent first, then risk.

I would argue that intent might be relevant when assigning legal consequences, but not when assessing the damage caused. If I catch a case of COVID, I’m not somehow less likely to die or suffer long-term effects because the person who gave it to me didn't intend to do so. Nor can I pay my hospital bills with their good intentions. And if they engaged in reckless behavior such as attending super-spreader events or failing to wear a mask, I have to question how good their intentions were in the first place. It sounds like the drunk driver who says “But I didn’t intend to run over that pedestrian”. Maybe not, but their gross negligence allowed it to happen.

Now for risk. I agree that we can’t eliminate risk from our lives entirely. But I hope that's not the litmus test for whether to take any prevention steps at all, especially if the cost of taking those steps is minimal. Take your example of getting behind the wheel of a car. It's likely that sooner or later, if I drive long enough, I'll get into some kind of accident, even if it's just someone rear-ending my car. I can't prevent this entirely, but I can mitigate the risk by getting regular maintenance on my car (i.e. new brake pads so I don't cause a fender-bender), refraining from driving drunk, keeping my auto insurance policy current so that I can pay out in the event I'm at-fault, etc. Wearing a mask is the public-health equivalent of getting new brake pads. It won't eliminate the risk of spreading COVID entirely, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw my hands up and admit defeat.

I would further argue that people are less-than-great judges of just how big a risk vector they are, because of the delay between when someone catches COVID and when they present symptoms. I've heard it can be up to two weeks, during which time that person is unknowingly exposing others. Because of this, and given the potential life-or-death consequences of catching COVID, it seems insane not to err on the side of caution.

[thu2111]

Masks don't work at all so your whole premise is false, and there's a lot of lying about this unfortunately. Here's just one example:

https://twitter.com/uncivengin/status/1337536854753595399/ph...

If mask mandates worked, they'd have a clear impact on incidence graphs. Many such graphs exist, none show any impact whatsoever - not even a small one.

https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/

Nobody wants to throw up their hands and admit defeat. But the people who don't wear masks aren't "insane" as you put it. Rather ironically, the cliché definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over whilst expecting different results, isn't it? Mask mandates have been implemented everywhere and there are no results to show for it, which makes continuing them the insane act. It's certainly not immoral or unethical for people to not wear a mask, any more than it is for someone not to wear a cross around their neck.

[toomanyrichies]

The tweet you linked to says "The masked counties had increases in cases after the mandate and used the high point as the reference for the decrease." If you're implying that this means masks have no effect, you should know that correlation does not equal causation.

There are multiple interpretations for the data in the tweet, one of which is that local authorities (correctly) anticipated a spike in cases based on conditions and behavior in their community, and responded with a mask mandate, which took a little less than 2 weeks to have a noticeable impact. The graph in your linked tweet shows that a mask mandate went into effect on July 3, then a spike occurred, which hit a peak on July 12th. That's consistent with the interpretation I mentioned.

It doesn't make sense to use the day after a mandate takes effect as a reference, because there's roughly a 2-week period between when a person catches COVID and when they exhibit symptoms or require hospitalization. The July 12th is a little less than 2 weeks after the mandate began, enough time for anyone who already had the virus before the mandate to exhibit symptoms.

As for the 2nd link you posted, graphs like these are useless without additional context on what was happening in those communities at the time. We don't know if people were actually following the mandate or not, how frequently they were taking their masks off, whether they were engaging in other behavior which would put them at risk for COVID exposure, etc. Until you can control for those variables, it's hard to take these graphs as evidence that masks don't work. Indeed, mask mandates will be useless if enough people don't follow them, or if people attend a super-spreader event in their area, or if any number of other things happen. That's... kind of my point.

You claim that "If mask mandates worked, they'd have a clear impact on incidence graphs". How do you know they didn't have an impact on incidence graphs? It's entirely possible that the spikes in those charts would have been even more severe without a mask mandate. There are hardly "no results to show for" masks, as you say. Indeed, the first tweet you linked to is someone replying to exactly that kind of evidence.[1] The TL;DR is "The governor of Kansas issued an executive order requiring wearing masks in public spaces, effective July 3, 2020, which was subject to county authority to opt out. After July 3, COVID-19 incidence decreased in 24 counties with mask mandates but continued to increase in 81 counties without mask mandates."

"Masks don't work at all" is a pretty bold statement considering the sources you posted are a collection of Twitter accounts belonging to people of unknown expertise. But don't listen to me, I'm not an expert either. Listen to the people who do this kind of thing for a living and who know what they're talking about. They know more than we do about their chosen field. There is a general consensus among serious experts that masks do work.[2][3][4][5][6]

Or if appeals to authority aren't your cup of tea, here[7] is an explanation of how masks work, specifically how they help filter and trap particles which carry COVID. If you still believe masks don't work, I'd love to see your rebuttal to the specific points that this NY Times article makes. I'm open to being proved wrong.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6947e2.htm 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8 3. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6947e2.htm 4. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i... 5. https://www.umms.org/coronavirus/what-to-know/masks/wearing-... 6. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou... 7. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/30/science/wear-...

[thu2111]

If you're implying that this means masks have no effect, you should know that correlation does not equal causation.

No, I'm implying what I said explicitly: some people have taken to deceptive tactics to try and argue mask mandates work, like truncating graphs to create apparent correlations where none really exist.

We don't know if people were actually following the mandate or not, how frequently they were taking their masks off, whether they were engaging in other behavior which would put them at risk for COVID exposure, etc

We do know this because the Delphi project has been tracking mask compliance, at least among Americans. It's extremely high, like above 90%. If mask mandates don't work with such high levels of compliance it means they don't work at all. And if masks 'worked' but had no observable effect due to other factors, that's logically the same as having no effect, isn't it?

How do you know they didn't have an impact on incidence graphs? It's entirely possible that the spikes in those charts would have been even more severe without a mask mandate

Even when controlling for increase in testing, the second wave in some places with mask mandates introduced after the first is equal in size to the first. If they worked that shouldn't be possible.

For something to be scientific you have to start with the null hypothesis. Believing in something despite evidence that it has no effect places us firmly in tiger-protecting rock territory - it's fundamentally a religious impulse rather than scientific. I could just as easily argue that the second waves would have been much smaller if we hadn't been wearing masks: I'd have no proof of that so I doubt you'd accept it, but it's no more valid than what you're arguing here. Yet maskers insist they are being scientific.

So far every piece of "evidence" for masks I've seen boils down to a correlation/causation fallacy. A few places where mask mandates were introduced as incidence was falling anyway are used to argue for them, and all the places where incidence went up or did nothing are ignored. The existence of second waves and second lockdowns despite masks is ignored. The studies pre-dating 2020 that showed masks don't seem to have any impact are ignored. The completely unstudied and hitherto-fore never proposed hypothesis that masks are meant to stop people infecting other people rather than stop people getting infected is taken as "scientific", even though it appears to have been made up on the spot for political reasons.

But don't listen to me, I'm not an expert either. Listen to the people who do this kind of thing for a living and who know what they're talking about. They know more than we do about their chosen field.

No, they don't. 2020 has made it abundantly clear that public health expertise is a massive fraud. These people systematically have no clue what they're talking about. Their predictions are always wrong, they constantly ignore evidence they're wrong, they lie all the time and their credibility is zero. As for random people on Twitter, do you really think I was making an appeal to their authority? Twitter is irrelevant, it just happened to be a place where the graphics are hosted. It's the data that matters to my argument, not who's making it.

Remember these 'experts' changed their positions on masks 180 degrees almost overnight. Now they claim they were previously lying en-masse. I don't think that's true, I think they were summarising the literature up to that point (which said masks don't really work) and then changed their views for political reasons. But even if you believe it was the other way around, it's impossible at this point to not believe in a massive coordinated conspiracy. Either they were all lying before or they were all lying now: it's not possible for it to be neither. There's really no point in making appeals to the authority of these people.

here[7] is an explanation of how masks work, specifically how they help filter and trap particles which carry COVID

I'm aware of how they are meant to work, it's obvious, nobody needs the New York Times to tell them that masks are meant to filter particles. Yet mask mandates (which is what we're talking about here) clearly don't work for any meaningful definition of work. If they did we wouldn't be seeing second waves larger than the first and being put into a wave of second lockdowns, would we?

Whether it's due to air going around the masks, most transmission being in-home, viruses being too small for masks to block them, people not wearing them right, masks being ineffective for viruses in general or whatever, doesn't actually interest me that much. That might be an interesting topic for mask manufacturers or doctors to investigate. But there's really no need to debate this: mask mandates are frequently followed by dramatic climbs in incidence, or falls, or no change at all. Meanwhile every claim that masks work is simply picking cases where the natural end of the first wave happens to roughly line up with when masks were introduced, ignoring the cases where they don't line up. Why should anyone be convinced by this?