5 ms·

So... while I accept the premise that mask wearing in a situation where you are also distanced, outside and vaccinated is probably a needless optimization, it's

So... while I accept the premise that mask wearing in a situation where you are also distanced, outside and vaccinated is probably a needless optimization, it's still an optimization. People wearing a mask are less likely to get sick. People wearing a mask are less likely to spread disease. That is true whether their base chance was 50% (a sick person eating across a table in an indoor restaurant for half an hour, say) or 0.01% as it is in your hypothetical. The difference is only in the calculation of the absolute, not relative, protection. It's not "pseudoscientific" to or "religious" to make a different risk analysis decision. People just have different tolerances. Broadly: be nice. You're not as right as you think you are, you're just braver.

dTal 6y ago
What's more, no one else can tell you're vaccinated. It's polite to be visibly making every attempt to prevent transmission to other people. There's also an argument that it's safer to have an easy, blanket rule, rather than permit everyone to editorialize on why they are super special and should be given a pass. There's a solidarity angle as well. Just wear the mask, darn it!
worker767424 6y ago
> it's still an optimization Maybe. Once you get to measures that have a negligible effect, weird things start to take over. Behavior change (feeling safer in a mask) is probably a bigger factor than the mask, itself, at that point.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > Maybe. Once you get to measures that have a negligible effect No, always. Masks are mechanical, they reduce risk by some fraction, period. Some fraction of particles that would enter or leave the lungs and into the environment don't, because they get trapped in the fabric. That doesn't have anything to do with how many particles there are. I think your logic mistake here is that you're assuming that all these mitigation strategies are correlated, that you need to stay distanced OR outside OR masked, etc... But that's not the way this works. All of those strategies help INDEPENDENTLY, and doing them all leads to less risk. Now, if you're 40' away from the nearest person and outside, it's true that your absolute risk is almost certainly so negligible as to make a mask irrelevant. But believing otherwise isn't "pseudoscience" or "religion", it's just a calculation error. Be nice.
  - remarkEon 6y ago
    >But believing otherwise isn't "pseudoscience" or "religion", it's just a calculation error. I think you're assuming that these people who want mask compliance at a 40' distance are doing the statistics like you are making the same conclusion about what behavior should be normal (a conclusion I disagree with). Some might be, but I doubt it's any non-trivial percentage. It's just a social norm now that's based not on science, but on a particular person's or group of persons' feelings. That is pseudoscience. Being "nice" is a, well, "nice" platitude but it isn't science. And after being lectured for more than a year about how "we need to follow the science" I find it more than a little annoying, but not unsurprising, that we're going to do otherwise.

dTal 6y ago

What's more, no one else can tell you're vaccinated. It's polite to be visibly making every attempt to prevent transmission to other people. There's also an argument that it's safer to have an easy, blanket rule, rather than permit everyone to editorialize on why they are super special and should be given a pass. There's a solidarity angle as well. Just wear the mask, darn it!

worker767424 6y ago

> it's still an optimization Maybe. Once you get to measures that have a negligible effect, weird things start to take over. Behavior change (feeling safer in a mask) is probably a bigger factor than the mask, itself, at that point.

newacct583 6y ago
> Maybe. Once you get to measures that have a negligible effect No, always. Masks are mechanical, they reduce risk by some fraction, period. Some fraction of particles that would enter or leave the lungs and into the environment don't, because they get trapped in the fabric. That doesn't have anything to do with how many particles there are. I think your logic mistake here is that you're assuming that all these mitigation strategies are correlated, that you need to stay distanced OR outside OR masked, etc... But that's not the way this works. All of those strategies help INDEPENDENTLY, and doing them all leads to less risk. Now, if you're 40' away from the nearest person and outside, it's true that your absolute risk is almost certainly so negligible as to make a mask irrelevant. But believing otherwise isn't "pseudoscience" or "religion", it's just a calculation error. Be nice.
- remarkEon 6y ago
  >But believing otherwise isn't "pseudoscience" or "religion", it's just a calculation error. I think you're assuming that these people who want mask compliance at a 40' distance are doing the statistics like you are making the same conclusion about what behavior should be normal (a conclusion I disagree with). Some might be, but I doubt it's any non-trivial percentage. It's just a social norm now that's based not on science, but on a particular person's or group of persons' feelings. That is pseudoscience. Being "nice" is a, well, "nice" platitude but it isn't science. And after being lectured for more than a year about how "we need to follow the science" I find it more than a little annoying, but not unsurprising, that we're going to do otherwise.