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The Board of Regents are political appointees so I'm not surprised this is the policy they came up with. I'm generally not a fan of blanket shelter in place ru

The Board of Regents are political appointees so I'm not surprised this is the policy they came up with. I'm generally not a fan of blanket shelter in place rules on freedom grounds, but the science is clear on the positive benefits of masks [0]. And there isn't really a down-side. [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

djsumdog 6y ago
There are a lot of downsides if asymptomatic spread isn't really true (the WHO said it wasn't and then walked it back .. reading a lot of the studies, I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest there is little to no asymptomatic spread; and the push to say otherwise is very political). Masks are very bad psychologically. They cause judgement and distrust, plus they're a pretty useless placebo effect. This virus is clearly no where near as dangerous as original made out to be, and I the normalization of the mask directly lead to an increase of violence during the recent riots all around the nation. They have the potential to lead people to take more risks and do things they wouldn't normally do[0]. It's absurd to think masks don't have any downsides. They certainly do. [0]: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/ https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/
- tripletao 6y ago
  Your link is vaguely Freudian storytelling, evoking a sort of secular spirituality more than anything resembling objective science. Here's a sample: > The wearing of a mask, under conditions in which an individual is aware that their face is no longer their ‘face’, will lead to a transformation away from the usual ‘self’ through a self-attributional process. Whatever the negative consequences of that self-attributional process, nurses, cleanroom operators, and countless others who routinely wear masks seem to have gotten over it, and to enjoy basically normal social interactions. You didn't quantify your claims as to the dangers of the virus, but ~0.3% of NYC--of the total population, not those confirmed or estimated infected--is dead from the coronavirus. Treatment has improved (no early ventilator use) since then, but that's a rough lower bound for the IFR. Herd immunity should come much sooner than 1-1/R0 of the population due to heterogeneity, but even a lower bound for IFR times a lower bound for total infected is a lot of dead people. Finally, the case count is increasing. So regardless of whether the people spreading it are truly asymptomatic, misattributing light symptoms to allergies or similar, or aware that they're seriously sick but going out anyways, they're out there spreading. A mask seems likely enough to help in all three such cases to be clearly cost-effective to me. Have you tried wearing a mask? What bad experience did you have? Some of the fabric ones are near-impossible to breathe through (especially the handmade ones in that pleated pattern everyone seems to have adopted). Lighter cotton or surgical-style seem fine to me, and are widely used here in California--and have been widely used in East Asia for decades--without obvious negative consequences.

djsumdog 6y ago

There are a lot of downsides if asymptomatic spread isn't really true (the WHO said it wasn't and then walked it back .. reading a lot of the studies, I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest there is little to no asymptomatic spread; and the push to say otherwise is very political). Masks are very bad psychologically. They cause judgement and distrust, plus they're a pretty useless placebo effect. This virus is clearly no where near as dangerous as original made out to be, and I the normalization of the mask directly lead to an increase of violence during the recent riots all around the nation. They have the potential to lead people to take more risks and do things they wouldn't normally do[0]. It's absurd to think masks don't have any downsides. They certainly do. [0]: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/ https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/43402/

tripletao 6y ago
Your link is vaguely Freudian storytelling, evoking a sort of secular spirituality more than anything resembling objective science. Here's a sample: > The wearing of a mask, under conditions in which an individual is aware that their face is no longer their ‘face’, will lead to a transformation away from the usual ‘self’ through a self-attributional process. Whatever the negative consequences of that self-attributional process, nurses, cleanroom operators, and countless others who routinely wear masks seem to have gotten over it, and to enjoy basically normal social interactions. You didn't quantify your claims as to the dangers of the virus, but ~0.3% of NYC--of the total population, not those confirmed or estimated infected--is dead from the coronavirus. Treatment has improved (no early ventilator use) since then, but that's a rough lower bound for the IFR. Herd immunity should come much sooner than 1-1/R0 of the population due to heterogeneity, but even a lower bound for IFR times a lower bound for total infected is a lot of dead people. Finally, the case count is increasing. So regardless of whether the people spreading it are truly asymptomatic, misattributing light symptoms to allergies or similar, or aware that they're seriously sick but going out anyways, they're out there spreading. A mask seems likely enough to help in all three such cases to be clearly cost-effective to me. Have you tried wearing a mask? What bad experience did you have? Some of the fabric ones are near-impossible to breathe through (especially the handmade ones in that pleated pattern everyone seems to have adopted). Lighter cotton or surgical-style seem fine to me, and are widely used here in California--and have been widely used in East Asia for decades--without obvious negative consequences.