[cruffle_duffle]

> wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"?

And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention.

Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.

[ben_w]

There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context.

And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted.

Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard.

They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard.

Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else.

> even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.

I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.

[simianparrot]

Nurses and doctors wear masks to protect the patient from their own moisture droplets which may contain contaminants when breathing or talking. Same with dentists.

Do note they don’t wear N95 masks so they can’t filter smaller particles like viruses. It’s just to protect you from their saliva and breath droplets and spreading larger bacteria.

N95 masks are fairly effective if worn precisely and close fitting, but barely anyone used those because they are harder to breathe in.

A cloth mask or thin medical mask does practically nothing except protect others from larger droplets.

[Hikikomori]

Do you also not wear seatbelts?