It seems both empirically and logically obvious that people who never develop the symptoms of COVID-19 are never really involved in its spread. This means that anyone who has never been “sick” with COVID-19–who has not had at least a briefly elevated temperature, a dry cough, and certain shortness of breath–has never had any reason to wear a mask.
What is madness about our response, and one more thing which is radically new, is that we are all being asked to act, at all times, as if we were sick but don’t know it yet. We are asked to wear masks, not to protect ourselves–because that would then be a matter of personal choice–but a a matter of social conscience. But this exercise is pointless, demonstrably, for 99.9% of us, each and every day. If we are sick, we know it, and there is every reason to stay home. That part makes sense and has always made sense. But if we are not sick and have never been sick, every moment of discomfort we have endured has been pointless, at least if we believe the data that masks are useless as PPE, and are only being recommended as Source Protection.
What spreads this or any other virus is little viruses in your breath, which have replicated in your lungs or elsewhere in your body, and which mingle with the moisture in your breathing. If you are in close contact with someone long enough, a certain number of these things lodge in your lungs, and then if allowed to by your immune system, replicate.
If you imagine fogging up a mirror with your breath, and all the water droplets which make up that fog being mingled with viruses the same size or smaller, you get an idea. We are all surrounded by a small cloud at all times.
But at least half the people who test positive for the presence of COVID-19 never develop symptoms. None of those people, most likely, are EVER contagious, because the “viral load”, as it is called, never develops sufficiently in you for you to spread it to others. Only symptomatic and–most importantly–PRE-symptomatic (people in whom the virus is incubating rapidly) people can spread this thing.
Every winter some 60 million people “get” the flu. But those are only the people with symptoms. There is every reason to believe that hundreds of millions of us are exposed every flu season, and that if we treated flu the way we are treating COVID-19, we could create the same mass panic every winter.
This thing is causing less than ten percent of the deaths, and overall mortality in 2020 is on track to be about what it was in 2019 and 2018. There is no mass dying going on. There is not even that much sickness, when you consider that some portion of the populace is sick with something all the time.