Masks

I am going to share some insights that are mind numbingly obvious, but overlooked by our media.

Insight number 1: IF YOU ARE NOT SICK YOU CANNOT INFECT ANYONE.

Insight number 2: IF YOU ARE NOT COUGHING AND SNEEZING NO AIRBORNE TRANSMISSION CAN TAKE PLACE. Your mucus and blood stay in you, unless you are sharing needles or something.  “Experts” say they are unsure of asymptomatic people can spread this, but as I discussed in a previous post, how WOULD they?  Absent coughing and unsanitized virus carrying hands, how COULD the virus be transmitted?  It’s not breathing.  I don’t think anyone has even tried to claim that.

Insight number 3: IF YOU ARE NOT COUGHING OR SNEEZING AND NO ONE AROUND YOU IS COUGHING AND SNEEZING, NO AIRBORNE DISEASE TRANSMISSION IS POSSIBLE.  Danger has warning signs.

Insight 4: if nobody in the room is sick, then no disease transmission whatever is possible. This applies even more strongly when you are alone.

Comment: The only place masks seem to make a difference is when an infected, coughing person is in sustained close proximity to someone who is not infected.  Basically, small offices and homes and medical settings.

With respect to offices, people who are sick should not be there.  If they come in anyway, they should get sent home.  No one disputes this.

Masks make sense for people whose job is work with infected people, often in close proximity, each and every day of their work week, as in healthcare.  This is obvious.

But for ordinary people, a strong case can be made that the home is the only place where masks DO make sense.  Put them on when you get home if someone in your family is sick, and take it off when you leave.

If you think about it, most of the places where COVID hit hard, like Italy, Wuhan and New York, the rulers of those places dictated everyone stay home.  Given that manifestly some percentage of them were sick, this was the WORST possible solution.  It would have made more sense telling people to sleep in the street or local parks, especially younger, healthier people.  

And I think it was often the case–particularly in China and Italy–that the elderly lived at home.  Telling people they could not go out on the street worked out to a death sentence for many of them.  The younger people otherwise would have been gone often, and the health of everyone suffered from the sustained confinement.

So literally, the streets in all those cities should have been full of people not wearing masks, who only put them on when they got home, after washing their hands.  The death toll could easily have been half what it was, I suspect, without paying more than a small fraction of the economic and political costs we can’t even yet begin to tally, but which we know will be enormous and without precedent.

Concluding claim: masks worn in public are anxiety reducing psychological placebos which create an illusion of safety where in most cases no objective danger existed in the first place. Their use outside medical settings is stupid, and seems to be demanded for political and not honest public health reasons.

And I will say that asking me to put a nettle in my underwear would also not be that major an imposition. But it WOULD be an imposition, and if it makes no sense, asking me to just do it to make everyone else happy is really a violence to my right to determine how I want to live my life.