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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe. I don't know why I would want to trust such people. If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired. I don't trust them because I don't think they're trustworthy.

Even if masks didn't work, stubborn refusal to wear them is nearly as bad- people should wear the even if they are skeptical on the effectiveness just in case they do work, because doing small things to possibly help your neighbors is part of the social contract.

I'm not talking about forcing people to wear masks, I'm talking about not trusting the people who don't voluntarily wear masks.

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But where does it end? People not wearing gas masks makes you less safe. People leaving their homes at all makes you less safe. A certain amount of risk is necessary if you're going to get out of your bed in the morning.

What most people (including me) do is this: we follow the law (in almost all cases) and we use our own subjective judgements to determine how to act besides that. This gets tricky because even if none of us breaks the law, our subjective judgements often differ. Some examples:

1. The law where I live says I need to wear a mask inside public places/stores, which I do happily.

2. I wear a mask when I'm outside and there's lots of people around, because according to my subjective judgement, this makes sense (the law does not require this).

3. I don't wear a mask when I'm outside and there aren't a lot of people around.

4. I don't wear a mask when I'm running along a trail.

5. I don't eat-in at restaurants, even though the law allows maskless, indoor dining.

What I find wrong about your comment is that you seem to be holding people accountable for not sharing the same subjective judgements as you. If I see people dining, maskless, inside a restaurant, I think "well, I wouldn't do that, but other people disagree". I don't categorize them as untrustworthy, bad people.

I finally met an anti-masker in person and it was not at all like I expected. I was at the playground and my kids started playing with this hippie mom's kids. We started talking about what a weird time it is to be a kid. We ended up making a playdate for the kids and she mentioned she does not wear masks because of some spiritual reasons. I was surprised because I thought that anti maskers were all right leaning. I told her no mask is fine we can just do our playdate outside somewheres. I am a conservative atheist hunter and think it is good for my kids to be able to play with spiritual hippie vegan kids.

Anyway I guess my point is life is better if you judge people on their individual merits rather than group membership.

> I was surprised because I thought that anti maskers were all right leaning.

It depends on places. In the area I live, it is also the neo-hippie/neo-rural/green/alternative-left who are anti-mask. But that's very localised, we happen to have a huge proportion of those various tendencies, that other people roughly group together and call with the word for 'hairy' in the local dialect :-), and less right and far-right people than elsewhere.

I'd worry that their kids wouldn't be up to date on their vaccines. You really don't want measles.

It's a low risk, obviously, especially if you are up to date. But as much as I like hippy vegans (not being sarcastic!) I would still worry they are walking around as potential measles incubators. If they have religious objections to wearing a piece of cloth over their face they probably aren't too excited about vaccines.

It's way down the list of things to worry about nowadays, obviously. But still.

What's this obsession of anti-anti-vax with measles? When I was on my national Reddit sub, it would come up 40 times a year.

When I was a kid, everyone was catching it. That was just one of those diseases you catch once and then you are done with it.

It is so low-risk that doctors didn't even declare the cases as they were supposed to be. They just observed them in case it would turn bad. Watching well and treating the few difficult case well made it so that there was just around 5 deaths a year, amongst cohorts of 800.000 who almost all caught it. At the scale of my department, that would be one letal case every 80 years... Outdoor leisure kill more in half a week here, as it was noticeable after lockdown (as we were very lucky with Covid, there were more outdoor leisure related death in 4 days of reopening than Covid related death from 9 months of first wave. NB: it was unfortunately different with second wave)

In the decade immediately before the measles vaccine was distributed in the US, an average of 495 deaths per year and 1000 people severly disabled (1). In modern per-capita US terms, that would be like 866 deaths (mostly children) and 1750 disabled. While that's not much compared to COVID, it is about 1/6 as many deaths as polio in its worst year in the US, and that was a widely feared virus.

The Measles vaccine is also a proxy for other behavior. Minimally, in the US, folks that aren't innoculated for measles probably aren't innoculated for mumps or rubella (as MMR is one vaccine), or other important vaccines altogether.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161023051702/https://www.cdc.g...

There is also the sick irony (no pun intended). The anti-vaxers are preventing a phase out of a vaccine by their actions. If measles got nationally eradicated or better yet internationally (a slow laborious process sadly) - it would mean fewer vaccines because it did its job perfectly.

> Other people not wearing a mask makes me less safe

Yes, but that's been true for a long time, even before covid. I'm betting you didn't mistrust non-mask-wearers pre-covid even though I'm sure several millions have died in the US alone since early 1920s because people with the flu or other contagious diseases didn't wear a mask and went to work sick, etc. You just didn't notice because it happened at a rate that didn't overload hospitals.

> If they can't even take a basic precaution during a deadly pandemic then their judgement seems dangerously impaired.

Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years. It's hard to put the blame 100% on the anti-masker. Plus, just because someone isn't wearing a mask doesn't automatically make them an anti-masker. I don't wear a mask when social distancing is possible, for example (like when going on runs).

^ Yes I know stock market is at all time high right now, but you can't just keep running an economy on printed money. If you aren't actually producing, soon all that paper you've printed will become a lot less valuable ("inflation") and the bubble will burst and you'll see what a real crisis looks like.

> You start to mistrust all of the zealots forcing you destroy the economy^, handicap an entire generation of students, destroy the mental wellbeing of many millions, in order to extend the lives of the elderly and immunocompromised by a few years

Wearing a mask doesn't destroy the economy or hurt students. It's the cheapest possible intervention. If wearing a mask helps, it actually sucks the wind out of the sails of people who want draconian lockdowns. People with a libertarian bent should be even more pro-masks, since it's very nearly the only thing that everyone can do in their personal lives to try stave off massive government interventions.

If people can't mentally separate masks from the other interventions then that seems like a problem in itself.

I feel like I am taking crazy pills whenever people bring up the economy with COVID responses. The virus doesn't and cannot care about the economy or holidays, or any other irrelvancy brought up for arguments. Not to mention the obvious - sick people and people trying to avoid being sick aren't good for the economy.

It is just such blatant illogic you would expect from primary schoolers and not adults with college degrees and sought after positions to use. Like declaring "but there is a picnic scheduled today!" and proceeding to go and hold a picnic in the middle of a record breaking forest fire.

> The virus doesn't and cannot care about the economy or holidays, or any other irrelevancy brought up for arguments

This is an overly simplistic view. The virus doesn't care, but policy makers should care, because if you optimize too much for saving lives from the virus at the cost of everything else, you might find the cure is worse than the disease.

Say you are a policymaker and a new disease emerges that will kill 1% of the population if left unchecked over time, mainly in the elderly. Also say that draconian control measures will cause suicide rate, unemployment, and mental health cases to go up 1% for every day they are in effect, mainly in young people.

What's your policy? Are you going to do everything you can to save the elderly at the expense of the youth? Or are you going to make sure the youth are good at the expense of the elderly? Something else entirely? As far as I can tell in the US, we are optimizing for saving the elderly and throwing everyone else under the bus in pursuit of that goal. We can expect to see a very large increase in suicides, unemployment, and mental health issues above and beyond what we saw in 2020 (including substance abuse) in coming months if we stay the course.

> Well imagine all of your news sources downplay covid and even when you get it yourself it's not as bad as the hysteria led you to believe - just some mild flulike symptoms and loss of smell and taste. You start to mistrust all of the zealots...

If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu, then while you might not be a bad person, you've earned my mistrust.

You can drop your mask if you want, but you can't really blame the OP for not trusting you.

> If you'd rather believe Fox News than scientists who are telling you this is much worse than the flu...

Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science because there's a disparity between the statistics on paper and what people actually experience in reality. I think most people understand now that covid is basically like the flu 99% of the time, and much worse than the flu for a tiny subset (and for the most part, the tiny subset can self-identify).

> Scientists say it is much worse than the flu. For the vast majority who actually experience the disease, it is not much worse than the flu. Thus, people start to mistrust the science ...

You're probably right: it's hard to understand the difference between statistical evidence and anecdotes. On the other hand, a lot of other people who don't experience COVID still seem to be able to separate their own lack of statistical knowledge from the ability to trust scientists. I think these mask deniers are mistrusting scientists for some other reason.

I dunno. It's worse than flu for more than 1%, about 1% die from it. A much larger proportion need to be hospitalized than from flu in a normal flu season.

Yes, you are right, it would have to be higher than 1%, but I think it would still be a minority. I searched around a bit, but it was super hard to find hard numbers. The closest I found was this[0] which seems to suggest that hospitalization rate of covid positive whites (including asians) is around 1%, but closer to 3-4% for other groups like blacks and latinos. I could be reading the charts wrong though.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

I suggest looking outside of your filter bubble.

I agree with your conclusions on when one should wear a mask. I disagree with your conclusions about the intelligence, reasoning ability, or basic humanity of anti-maskers.

If you're someone who is flooded with reports of scientists waffling, of problematic reasons why people want you to wear masks, of health officials adjusting the rules du jour independent of defensible rationalizations, of higher-ups enforcing rules that they do not themselves follow, etc., and are NOT exposed to the (imho correct) arguments as to why mask-wearing is necessary and important... why wouldn't you conclude that it's a scam?

None of the conclusions about mask wearing can be made with 100% certainty. There really is a lot of bullshit going around on all sides. Even a fairly weak selection filter is enough to make perfectly rational actors come to opposite conclusions.

Our society is based on the implicit assumption that we all see more or less the same thing, so we can depend on (trust) that our sense of "normal" is shared, at least to some degree.

That assumption no longer holds. (Or rather, it holds for far fewer topics than it used to.)

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