[kjksf]

Being killed by a falling brick is a very clear cost.

How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?

Talking about cost without normalizing for probability of prevention is meaningless yet you want to frame the discussion to be purely about (low) cost of wearing masks.

We had a year of a pretty tough lockdown, most people wearing masks, distancing in grocery shops, restaurants and "non-essential" shops and companies closed, no public events, work from home, most people staying at home etc.

And yet people were getting sick with covid, even those wearing masks.

Masks alone won't protect you from covid. Even pretty hard core isolation might not protect you.

We basically have no idea how effective just wearing masks is. It surely reduces the probability but by how much?

Feel free to wear masks and hard hats but don't pretend you know for sure it's a rational choice.

[TaylorAlexander]

If I was surrounded by falling bricks I’d definitely consider it!

For me the costs aren’t just wearing a mask or getting sick. I also have vulnerable people in my life. My partner, their partners, my elderly parents, friends with unknown connections.

If I walked around the grocery store without a mask I could at any time pick up the virus and even if I don’t get very sick I could give it to friends or loved ones. So then there is a mental load of worrying if I’m feeling fatigue due to poor sleep or onset of the virus (which is how it happened when I actually had it), and wondering if I should cancel social plans when I’m not feeling 100% normal.

If I am always wearing masks in public I can relax about it more when seeing friends. I’m being responsible and while accidents do happen I’m at least not being negligent.

I notice a lot of people not masking are only talking about themselves. It’s like they don’t think about how transmitting the illness affects others.

[blockwriter]

You can relax in public without the mask as well. There are more pressing moral and social concerns in our day to day lives.

[tshaddox]

> Being killed by a falling brick is a very clear cost.

> How would you characterize the costs associated with wearing a hard hat most of the time when in public?

But wait, that's a very different question. The original comment was "I'd rather be sick for 2 weeks than wear a mask every day." You're not saying that you'd rather be killed by a falling brick than wear a hardhat every day, surely.

[asiachick]

Not to defend the op. I wear a mask. But, people do make this choice all the time. They take a car instead of walk (AFAIK that means they're more likely to die). They don't wear a helmet when walking (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/falls). People make choices all the time to be less safe in a way that would have prevented deaths.

[2-718-281-828]

he'd rather _risk_ being killed by a brick than wear a hard hat everywhere. same as me. you should definitely wear one and a mask and also other safety devices like a kevlar west, hard tip shoes etc

[jandrewrogers]

Interestingly, traumatic brain injury is responsible for more deaths than influenza. If we all wore helmets it would save a lot of lives.

[8note]

Traumatic brain injury is much easier to attribute to a death, rather than viruses that are more likely to be involved in some other cause of death, like a bacterial pneumonia.

If I learned anything from COVID times, it's that attributing deaths is complex, and roughly up to whoever writes the death certificate

[micromacrofoot]

falling bricks didn't kill 1 million americans over the past 2 years

[anon_coward_ghk]

Generally everyone is vulnerable to falling bricks, whereas the evidence shows that those who will die from covid are most likely obese / elderly / smokers / diabetics / etc.

[micromacrofoot]

this doesn't really influence my comment, if 1 million people over the past 2 years died of falling bricks I'd wear a helmet

[anon_coward_ghk]

As would I, because falling bricks kill young healthy people.

HIV kills ~650K per year, should everyone take PreP?

[micromacrofoot]

I do

[anon_coward_ghk]

We have that in common then, but I asked if everyone should take it. Does my grandma need it?

[gjsman-1000]

Also, imagine if said hard hat caused unknown long-term effects by itself. We know, for a fact, that some plastic fibers from masks end up in the lungs permanently. What happens when they go there? Nobody knows. How many of them are there in the average person? Nobody knows. What are the long term effects? Nobody knows. How does it affect lung development in both short-term and long-term, particularly in young people? Nobody knows. We just hope it's fine.

[Diederich]

How would you compare these cited risks associated with mask wear with the risks associated with more likely C19 infections, and perhaps more important with the emergent recognition of risks associated with long covid?

My wife works with long covid people most of the day every day. Included are young, healthy, active, fully vaccinated people who can hardly walk up a flight of stairs...six months after a very mild C19 infection. Or senior technical members of silicon valley companies you've heard of that are so brain fogged that they are incapable of doing anything like the work they did previously.

Yes, the prior paragraph is anecdotal, strong as it may be. Fortunately scientific studies are starting to gain some understanding of long covid.

Compare all this to the risks associated with wearing masks.

There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?

[gjsman-1000]

In which case, get vaccinated, and wear a mask yourself, if that concerns you. For those of us who have had COVID and recovered quickly (like myself, in ~2 days), you need to convince me that my mask-wearing protects anyone else, when they can wear masks themselves if they are so inclined. Even then, with 58% of COVID hospitalizations being vaccinated, and over 82% of the nation having had COVID at some point (according to IMHE), mask wearing and vaccination appears to be a deferment on the inevitable.

> There have been cohorts of people wearing masks all day every day for many decades now. Has there been any evidence of the effects you outlined?

Said masks were generally worn temporarily, not all day, every day, for a job. When worn for long periods of time, before COVID, OSHA actually had forbade it unless there was air filtering and frequent replacement (minimum daily). The way we wear masks, without filtering and with (in practice) no frequent replacement, would have been illegal to compel any person to do a few years ago, let alone study the safety of.

Edit: Also, on that note, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/. It's a long-study on the actual, real-world risks of mask-wearing. It's not concerned with risk/benefit, only the risk side of it, but it shows that masks are far from the risk-free preventative measure we pretend they are. If you already had COVID, looking at what they document (and this is the NIH, remember), it may be worse for your health to continue masking.

[Diederich]

Thanks for the link, I'm looking forward to reading through it.

[jltsiren]

Disposable masks have been routinely used in healthcare since at least the 1960s. I would be extremely surprised if there are no studies of the long-term health effects of mask use. Especially since the people who could do such research are the ones who would suffer most from any adverse effects.

[gjsman-1000]

There are some, even from this pandemic. They aren't great.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/

[Erikun]

I've never heard of that, if that is a fact it would be nice to include a reference.