All the Covid safety rules are little more than theater

This is a fairly infantile argument, which essentially boils down to: If your defense isn't perfect, it's silly.

Wearing a mask isn't to do with perfectly isolating your biological self from society. It's to do with numbers. I would suspect we've _all_ been exposed to at least a few thousand COVID-19 virons - luckily a significant viral load is measured in the billions of particles. Wearing a mask simply decreases the probability of spreading or catching a significant number of particles.

No defense for Cuomo, and agreed about using a video call, but suggesting that there is a hypocrisy in "wear it as much as you can" is silly. This is a bit like suggesting firewalls are pointless since a few IPs are whitelisted, or a coding standard is pointless because a few people don't follow it perfectly.

What the world needs now, more than anything, is pragmatism, not idealism.

The Dutch apparently think that some of the rules other countries use are unnecessary. Here are the Dutch rules:

"Dutch measures against coronavirus: basic rules for everyone":

https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/tackli...

"Dutch government will not advise public to wear masks - minister":

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-nether...

True! And in the adult, free world, government advises safety practices, disseminates recommendations and people assess their risk and act accordingly.

In the government as benevolent god-parent world, people assume they're safe if they follow the ever-changing (in so many cases over the pandemic: 180deg overnight, at precisely the worst times...months after the spread started) guidelines, when their own common sense was often more correct to begin with.

This is obvious since all the mobility data, etc. suggests people act well before government gets its act together. The people pre-empted closures and they're pre-empting re-opening.

If you live in a city it very much makes sense to wear a mask outside because you pass by people all the time.