[sokoloff]

Once we achieve widespread (and seemingly very effective) vaccines, it’s not at all clear to me that spending trillions per year on masks for everyone and generating that additional amount of trash is the best use of those funds or “inconvenience points”.

[blagie]

Trillions?

That's the harm to the economy. That's not the cost of masks.

Providing everyone in the US with two high-quality N95-equivalent masks each week for a year would be at most $60 billion. ($2 per mask * 100 masks * 300 million people, at retail prices).

We didn't do that. Our kids have a half-year of learning loss. Small businesses around me closed, and a ton of people fell behind on mortgages. We're looking at pretty high inflation from how we've expended our money supply, eventually. Etc.

Part of the reason these things look like bad use of funds is that people don't do ROI calculations, and confuse millions, billions, and trillions. A trillion is a thousand times more than a billion, and a million times more than a million. But to everyone a MILLION dollars looks like a big number, as does a TRILLION dollars.

People also confuse the ridiculously high effectiveness of proper masks with the fairly low effectiveness of cloth masks.

[sokoloff]

> Providing everyone in the US

Can people not in the US harbor the virus? I assumed you were trying to eradicate it and to do so with your original figure of $2/day/person masks, it’s trillions per year worldwide. You later silently amended (not sure if in error or moving the goalpost) that figure to 2 masks/week in your $60B/yr estimate to cover most, not all, of the people in the US.

$2/day/person * 365 day/year * 7.5 B people/world -> over $5T/year/world

Thanks for the unneeded lesson on powers of 10, though.

[blagie]

sigh

* My comment was about the US. See the last line of my comment.

* In the US, the economic gains of having rolled out N95 and equivalent masks when they become widely available would have cost orders-of-magnitude less than the masks. Ending COVID19 sooner would still pay for a program like this today.

* Whether or not the vaccine will stop COVID19 is still TBD. We don't have good numbers on impact on spread, on ultimate vaccination rates, nor on mutations. It seems on-track, but still TBD.

* Yes, similar measures would need to be taken elsewhere to fully eradicate the virus, and that's assuming no animal stores. Doing math there brings up a million apples-to-oranges comparisons.

* Numbers in second post were was based on similar (successful) programs implemented in Taiwan and Korea, which did stop COVID19 (pre-vaccine) and allowed those economies to continue functioning, while ours imploded. Quotas were 2-3 per week, and everyone was required to use (and reuse) them. My second comment was more precise, if anything.