9 ms·

This title is a bit sensationalist. According to the article itself, the difference between masked and unmasked confirmed contagion is 5.9 cases per 100,000 pop

This title is a bit sensationalist. According to the article itself, the difference between masked and unmasked confirmed contagion is 5.9 cases per 100,000 population. The death rate for confirmed contagion by COVID is 1.6 % in the USA. So, imposing mask mandates in Missouri would result in 0.096 fewer deaths per 100,000 people, or, in all Missouri with a population of 6,137,428, enforcing mask mandates, would have saved 6 (six, single-digit) people. Is it reasonable, to impose a mandate such as this that negatively alters people daily life to this extent, in order prevent 6 people in the all-state from dying? EDIT: Grammar

onion2k 5y ago
The implication of your "logic" is that there is a specific threshold number of people who would need to die for you to decide it's worthwhile asking people to wear masks. That number has to be more than 6, or you'd be saying the mandate was worthwhile and should have been imposed. I wonder how many it is.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  The implication of your logic is that any mandate that saves even one life is worth it, no matter how onerous. This is what the authoritarians that want to ban smoking, sugar and alcohol are hoping you agree with.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    The implication of your logic is that any mandate that saves even one life is worth it, no matter how onerous. That's not the logical implication of my post at all. I'm not saying "lives are more important than everything else"; I'm saying "wearing masks isn't onerous, so how many people need to die before you'll wear one?" To suggest that we should totally change our way of life to save people, by giving up alcohol for example, is too much. To make a tiny change that has almost no impact on you to save lives isn't too much.
    - harpersealtako 5y ago
      The crux of the issue is that there is a cutoff point somewhere, where lives saved outstrips the burden to the individual, but we cannot agree on a cutoff point because it involves a variety of subjective value judgements. We probably agree that there are cases where the value of individual freedom is more important than the lives saved (e.g. most people would be against banning sugar in soda pop), and that there are cases where lives saved is more important than individual freedoms (e.g. most people would be in favor of banning cyanide in soda pop). Then there are cases where there is a pretty healthy debate, e.g. "should sarsaparilla be banned in soda pop?" Sarsaparilla, the traditional flavor of root beer, contains safrole, which has been shown to be highly carcinogenic in mice, which is why the FDA recently banned it. But if you ask the people who are against the ban, they might give you a variety of reasons you don't expect, which is a good exercise because there are some decent analogues to the anti-mask argument, even if it's not a perfect analogy obviously: * the evidence that it's harmful is humans is somewhat debatable (anti-mask-mandate people might argue about the quality of the evidence that wearing masks reduces deaths) * other foods like nutmeg contain safrole but aren't banned (anti-mask-mandate people might argue that restrictions are arbitrary and thus may have an ulterior motive) * sarsaparilla has a quality that some people prefer to the non-toxic alternatives for subjective reasons such as the taste (anti-mask-mandate people might say that they subjectively prefer not wearing masks, e.g. because they find them uncomfortable or inconvenient) * sarsaparilla farmers may be impacted particularly heavily even if most people are not (anti-mask-mandate people might suggest that while most people, even themselves, are not heavily burdened by wearing masks, it might more seriously burden a smaller minority of people [1]) * people with certain moral/ethical/religious/political beliefs might be fundamentally against the idea of a government forcing such a ban on the population, or even the government having the authority in the first place to impose such a ban, even if they agreed with the rationale and personally stopped drinking sarsaparilla soda (the anti-mask-mandate argument is roughly identical of course) Hopefully the analogy isn't too out-there. I'm still ambivalent personally on mask mandates myself to be clear, for a combination of some of the arguments above. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  Yes, there is always a threshold proportional to the inconvenience caused. If you are fine with any inconvenience, then the number one life saving thing is banning travelling.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Travel bans are only effective if each area has different rates of infection. Without that bans are simply another form of social distancing, shutting down airports being roughly equivalent to shutting down movie theaters.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      That isn't quite right. Even with same infection rates travel bans limit the ability of virus mutations to escape. However for a travel ban to work it needs to be applied strongly and for a long time. If you wait until a new variant is found worth watching closely it is too late as it is already across the ban and will spread on both sides. The US needs a travel ban that covers cities (MSA?) to really be good. I have no idea how you would pull that off. (both constitutionally and logistically seem impossible)
      - Retric 5y ago
        Logistics is also an issue at the national level. In practice travel bans aren’t completely effective so novel variants like Omicron will slip through national level travel bans outside of tiny island nations. That isn’t to say slowing things down is useless, nor that quarantines are completely ineffective. It’s just that travel bans tend to have gaps and with a disease it only takes one.
- beagle3 5y ago
  The logic is sound. You can save essentially every single person who will die in a traffic accident by banning cars. That’s likely a hundred or two people a year just in Missouri. There’s a cost and a benefit, and most people would say that - no, the benefit of 100-200 people per year is not worth the cost of banning cars. But if it was 200,000/year, they would likely say yes. The costs of masks are small but not zero - there’s pollution, there’s bacterial infections (masks that aren’t replaced every few hours are Petri dishes), there’s cognitive delay for babies, there’s horrible experience for the hearing impaired lip readers. You may believe the cost/benefit is worth it, someone else will disagree. But it always comes down to just that - a cost benefit analysis.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I've wanted to ban cars for that reason for years, I know it isn't realistic, but I still want to. I favor more drivers training. I favor limiting the drivers ability to adjust the radio. I favor more/better transit. If self driving cars ever become real I'll favor them (right now they have enough limits as to not count).
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    > You can save essentially every single person who will die in a traffic accident by banning cars. This, but unironically. (This post brought to you by Train Gang.)
  - onion2k 5y ago
    The costs of masks are small but not zero - there’s pollution, there’s bacterial infections (masks that aren’t replaced every few hours are Petri dishes), there’s cognitive delay for babies, there’s horrible experience for the hearing impaired lip readers. If your reasoning for refusing to wear a mask when you go to Walmart is "What if a lip-reader can't tell what I'm saying?!" then I think you might be a ... well, I won't put the word here because some people don't like it, but it begins with C.
    - beagle3 5y ago
      If that’s what you read into my post, all I can say is, we’ll, not sure what I can say cause you’ll likely read it wrong too.
- stackedinserter 5y ago
  We tolerate driving, construction sites, motorcycles, alcohol consumption, cops with guns and don't go into lockdowns during flu season. There's a number of people who need to die every day due to those factors, and you're okay with that. What is your number?
  - onion2k 5y ago
    We tolerate those things because they're useful. They enable our way of life. Wearing a mask has essentially no impact on our lives, so it's not really worth accepting deaths in order to not wear one. You just wear one, and fewer people die, and nothing else changes. It's not like giving up cars or construction sites at all. The problem here is that you're trying to claim that the utility that cars provide to society is equivalent to the utility of going shopping without a mask on. That argument is obviously stupid.
    - stackedinserter 5y ago
      Breathing air that's not filtered through wet dirty piece of cloth is useful too. If you're ready to wear mask all the time for the rest of your life, would you agree that we need to start wearing hard hats all the time? That will definitely save some lives. Same for motorcycle helmets for bicycles - why not? Hazmat suits for shopping - why not? They must be much more efficient than just masks. Why wouldn't we ban motorcycles and mountain bikes? They are not "useful" and take lives every year. Safety is number one priority out of one, right? BTW words like "stupid" and "obviously" don't add credibility to whatever you say.
Retric 5y ago
That’s the difference over 2 months for a specific implementation, longer term you need to multiply that by the number of months during the pandemic and the feedback loop from having fewer infected people walking around. Are mask mandates worth saving at minimum 3 lives per month (~150 nationwide) and significantly more suffering? Well that depends on why you think a mandate is a bad idea. Some people might say killing 3,000 people per month is perfectly acceptable to avoid a mask mandate, others might say even avoiding 1 hospitalization is worth a mask mandate.
nradov 5y ago
The CDC's best estimate of fatality rate was 0.6% (not 1.6%) back when we had a largely unvaccinated population. Now with vaccines and other improved treatments the fatality rate is significantly lower. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
- Pxtl 5y ago
  On the other hand, that depends on ICUs being able to manage capacity. As the infection rate goes up, the death rate can go up as less of those improved treatments are available. Also, as infection rate goes up, you get side-effect problems where non-urgent but necessary treatments (like cancer surgeries) are deferred.
- Retric 5y ago
  That’s measuring something else. Asymptomatic carriers and people with mild symptoms only get tested when promoted by something other than the disease. So 0.6% of infections, is roughly equivalent to 1.6% of positive test results because very sick people are vastly more likely to get tested. Aka 15.9 infections per 100,000 people is roughly equivalent to 5.9 confirmed cases and they result in the same number of deaths.
Someone1234 5y ago
Death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID-19 infection. That's also why using excess deaths is a better metric than direct deaths, since if COVID overwhelms hospitals and e.g. heart attack or cancer deaths skyrocket that is a related death. But if you've created a bunch of new disabled people, that isn't exactly a fantastic outcome either and one more poorly tracked (e.g. I personally know someone who couldn't work for a few months following hospitalization and recovery).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
You forgot the so important "per day" part. > The statewide data shows that, from the end of April to the end of October, jurisdictions with mask mandates experienced an average of 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents compared to 21.7 cases per day for every 100,000 residents in unmasked communities. So, we have a decrease from 21.7 cases PER DAY, to 15.8 cases PER DAY, that is a 27% decrease. A "layman's analysis" would tell us that mask mandates would have saved 6 people per day, ~180 per month in the state. That is already a considerable number, but that is not even the whole story, epidemics are all about the exponential transmission, every small decrease compounds to a much greater decrease in the future.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Great and subtle point we must reduce the spread before it gets too big, Not after that. It is like the story of a boy who saw a hole in the damn and put his finger in it to stop it. There was not much water passing through such a small hole. But the boy was smart and realized if he let the water run through the hole, the hole would fast grow bigger and bigger so the whole damn would soon break. When the levee breaks mama you got to go.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
alexggordon 5y ago
All due respect but this comment demonstrates a naive understanding of COVID and mask mandates. It's possible this comment is just trolling as it's the only comment your account has made but I'll attempt to address the issues with it regardless. First, calculating a theoretical number of deaths through end result statistics does not result in a number that can be used to support a logical argument. When approximating deaths for something like COVID, the things that matter are: 1. The fatality rate of COVID, assuming the hospital you're treated at has sufficient means to treat you. 2. The fatality rate of COVID, assuming the hospital you're treated at does NOT have sufficient means to treat you. 3. The contagiousness/ability of the virus and likelihood that you'll spread the virus to someone else once you've contracted it (R naught). Basically, think of this as the number of people you'll infect if you get the virus. 4. The number of people in a population who can be infected by an individual at any specific time (effective reproduction number) You can't just take a slice of time and say "6" people will die, and remove mask mandates, as COVID spreads through exponential growth. The benefits of wearing a mask compound, just like not wearing mask compounds in a worse way. Think of it this way. If the R naught of a virus is above 1, (say 1.1) then the virus will continue to spread. If it continues to infect more and more people, unchecked, it will eventually infect almost everyone. If it infects everyone, with a fatality rate of 1.6% in Missouri, it will kill thousands, not 6. The ways available to us to stop COVID are to attack all facets mentioned above. I won't go into all of them, as mask mandates solely aim to curb 3. The goal of mask mandates is to make it so if you have the virus, you infect less than 1 person, so that the virus stops spreading.[1] But the benefits affect all the above, such as, if the virus continues to spread (R naught above 1), then eventually we run out of hospital capacity. If we run out of hospital capacity, the death rate skyrockets, as many preventable deaths are no longer preventable. So, mask mandates now also potentially benefit healthcare capacity (flatten the curve, remember?). So, to specifically isolate the issue with your argument, the number of cases per 100k with and without masks doesn't matter if the virus is still spreading. If it's still spreading, it will still infect everyone eventually, and take its 1.6% of the population at the end of the day. Mask mandates are one component (on top of vaccines, social distancing, hygiene, etc) to lowering the R naught below 1. So, is it reasonable, to impose a mandate such as this that negatively alters people daily life to this extent, in order to prevent tens of thousands of deaths in the all-state from dying? The answer is yes. [0] Good introduction to R naught and R_e https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/ [1] Thorough review of mask wearing statistics and benefits https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/4/e2014564118.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/4/e2014564118.full.pdf [2] A better introduction to modeling COVID 19 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9
Pxtl 5y ago
6 cases can be the difference between an R value > 1 or < 1, resulting in positive or negative growth. Remember geometric growth is in play.
ldehaan 5y ago
Hey another brain user, so nice to see others with braincells that function. One day you might even get voted down to the cool kids table, but you have to tell a bunch of helpless nerds with no life experience how the world works as they cower under their desks and click the down button until the bad man can't be seen.

onion2k 5y ago

The implication of your "logic" is that there is a specific threshold number of people who would need to die for you to decide it's worthwhile asking people to wear masks. That number has to be more than 6, or you'd be saying the mandate was worthwhile and should have been imposed. I wonder how many it is.

commandlinefan 5y ago
The implication of your logic is that any mandate that saves even one life is worth it, no matter how onerous. This is what the authoritarians that want to ban smoking, sugar and alcohol are hoping you agree with.
- onion2k 5y ago
  The implication of your logic is that any mandate that saves even one life is worth it, no matter how onerous. That's not the logical implication of my post at all. I'm not saying "lives are more important than everything else"; I'm saying "wearing masks isn't onerous, so how many people need to die before you'll wear one?" To suggest that we should totally change our way of life to save people, by giving up alcohol for example, is too much. To make a tiny change that has almost no impact on you to save lives isn't too much.
  - harpersealtako 5y ago
    The crux of the issue is that there is a cutoff point somewhere, where lives saved outstrips the burden to the individual, but we cannot agree on a cutoff point because it involves a variety of subjective value judgements. We probably agree that there are cases where the value of individual freedom is more important than the lives saved (e.g. most people would be against banning sugar in soda pop), and that there are cases where lives saved is more important than individual freedoms (e.g. most people would be in favor of banning cyanide in soda pop). Then there are cases where there is a pretty healthy debate, e.g. "should sarsaparilla be banned in soda pop?" Sarsaparilla, the traditional flavor of root beer, contains safrole, which has been shown to be highly carcinogenic in mice, which is why the FDA recently banned it. But if you ask the people who are against the ban, they might give you a variety of reasons you don't expect, which is a good exercise because there are some decent analogues to the anti-mask argument, even if it's not a perfect analogy obviously: * the evidence that it's harmful is humans is somewhat debatable (anti-mask-mandate people might argue about the quality of the evidence that wearing masks reduces deaths) * other foods like nutmeg contain safrole but aren't banned (anti-mask-mandate people might argue that restrictions are arbitrary and thus may have an ulterior motive) * sarsaparilla has a quality that some people prefer to the non-toxic alternatives for subjective reasons such as the taste (anti-mask-mandate people might say that they subjectively prefer not wearing masks, e.g. because they find them uncomfortable or inconvenient) * sarsaparilla farmers may be impacted particularly heavily even if most people are not (anti-mask-mandate people might suggest that while most people, even themselves, are not heavily burdened by wearing masks, it might more seriously burden a smaller minority of people [1]) * people with certain moral/ethical/religious/political beliefs might be fundamentally against the idea of a government forcing such a ban on the population, or even the government having the authority in the first place to impose such a ban, even if they agreed with the rationale and personally stopped drinking sarsaparilla soda (the anti-mask-mandate argument is roughly identical of course) Hopefully the analogy isn't too out-there. I'm still ambivalent personally on mask mandates myself to be clear, for a combination of some of the arguments above. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
Yes, there is always a threshold proportional to the inconvenience caused. If you are fine with any inconvenience, then the number one life saving thing is banning travelling.
- Retric 5y ago
  Travel bans are only effective if each area has different rates of infection. Without that bans are simply another form of social distancing, shutting down airports being roughly equivalent to shutting down movie theaters.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    That isn't quite right. Even with same infection rates travel bans limit the ability of virus mutations to escape. However for a travel ban to work it needs to be applied strongly and for a long time. If you wait until a new variant is found worth watching closely it is too late as it is already across the ban and will spread on both sides. The US needs a travel ban that covers cities (MSA?) to really be good. I have no idea how you would pull that off. (both constitutionally and logistically seem impossible)
    - Retric 5y ago
      Logistics is also an issue at the national level. In practice travel bans aren’t completely effective so novel variants like Omicron will slip through national level travel bans outside of tiny island nations. That isn’t to say slowing things down is useless, nor that quarantines are completely ineffective. It’s just that travel bans tend to have gaps and with a disease it only takes one.
beagle3 5y ago
The logic is sound. You can save essentially every single person who will die in a traffic accident by banning cars. That’s likely a hundred or two people a year just in Missouri. There’s a cost and a benefit, and most people would say that - no, the benefit of 100-200 people per year is not worth the cost of banning cars. But if it was 200,000/year, they would likely say yes. The costs of masks are small but not zero - there’s pollution, there’s bacterial infections (masks that aren’t replaced every few hours are Petri dishes), there’s cognitive delay for babies, there’s horrible experience for the hearing impaired lip readers. You may believe the cost/benefit is worth it, someone else will disagree. But it always comes down to just that - a cost benefit analysis.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I've wanted to ban cars for that reason for years, I know it isn't realistic, but I still want to. I favor more drivers training. I favor limiting the drivers ability to adjust the radio. I favor more/better transit. If self driving cars ever become real I'll favor them (right now they have enough limits as to not count).
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > You can save essentially every single person who will die in a traffic accident by banning cars. This, but unironically. (This post brought to you by Train Gang.)
- onion2k 5y ago
  The costs of masks are small but not zero - there’s pollution, there’s bacterial infections (masks that aren’t replaced every few hours are Petri dishes), there’s cognitive delay for babies, there’s horrible experience for the hearing impaired lip readers. If your reasoning for refusing to wear a mask when you go to Walmart is "What if a lip-reader can't tell what I'm saying?!" then I think you might be a ... well, I won't put the word here because some people don't like it, but it begins with C.
  - beagle3 5y ago
    If that’s what you read into my post, all I can say is, we’ll, not sure what I can say cause you’ll likely read it wrong too.
stackedinserter 5y ago
We tolerate driving, construction sites, motorcycles, alcohol consumption, cops with guns and don't go into lockdowns during flu season. There's a number of people who need to die every day due to those factors, and you're okay with that. What is your number?
- onion2k 5y ago
  We tolerate those things because they're useful. They enable our way of life. Wearing a mask has essentially no impact on our lives, so it's not really worth accepting deaths in order to not wear one. You just wear one, and fewer people die, and nothing else changes. It's not like giving up cars or construction sites at all. The problem here is that you're trying to claim that the utility that cars provide to society is equivalent to the utility of going shopping without a mask on. That argument is obviously stupid.
  - stackedinserter 5y ago
    Breathing air that's not filtered through wet dirty piece of cloth is useful too. If you're ready to wear mask all the time for the rest of your life, would you agree that we need to start wearing hard hats all the time? That will definitely save some lives. Same for motorcycle helmets for bicycles - why not? Hazmat suits for shopping - why not? They must be much more efficient than just masks. Why wouldn't we ban motorcycles and mountain bikes? They are not "useful" and take lives every year. Safety is number one priority out of one, right? BTW words like "stupid" and "obviously" don't add credibility to whatever you say.

Retric 5y ago

That’s the difference over 2 months for a specific implementation, longer term you need to multiply that by the number of months during the pandemic and the feedback loop from having fewer infected people walking around. Are mask mandates worth saving at minimum 3 lives per month (~150 nationwide) and significantly more suffering? Well that depends on why you think a mandate is a bad idea. Some people might say killing 3,000 people per month is perfectly acceptable to avoid a mask mandate, others might say even avoiding 1 hospitalization is worth a mask mandate.

nradov 5y ago

The CDC's best estimate of fatality rate was 0.6% (not 1.6%) back when we had a largely unvaccinated population. Now with vaccines and other improved treatments the fatality rate is significantly lower. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Pxtl 5y ago
On the other hand, that depends on ICUs being able to manage capacity. As the infection rate goes up, the death rate can go up as less of those improved treatments are available. Also, as infection rate goes up, you get side-effect problems where non-urgent but necessary treatments (like cancer surgeries) are deferred.
Retric 5y ago
That’s measuring something else. Asymptomatic carriers and people with mild symptoms only get tested when promoted by something other than the disease. So 0.6% of infections, is roughly equivalent to 1.6% of positive test results because very sick people are vastly more likely to get tested. Aka 15.9 infections per 100,000 people is roughly equivalent to 5.9 confirmed cases and they result in the same number of deaths.

Someone1234 5y ago

Death isn't the only negative outcome of a COVID-19 infection. That's also why using excess deaths is a better metric than direct deaths, since if COVID overwhelms hospitals and e.g. heart attack or cancer deaths skyrocket that is a related death. But if you've created a bunch of new disabled people, that isn't exactly a fantastic outcome either and one more poorly tracked (e.g. I personally know someone who couldn't work for a few months following hospitalization and recovery).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago

You forgot the so important "per day" part. > The statewide data shows that, from the end of April to the end of October, jurisdictions with mask mandates experienced an average of 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents compared to 21.7 cases per day for every 100,000 residents in unmasked communities. So, we have a decrease from 21.7 cases PER DAY, to 15.8 cases PER DAY, that is a 27% decrease. A "layman's analysis" would tell us that mask mandates would have saved 6 people per day, ~180 per month in the state. That is already a considerable number, but that is not even the whole story, epidemics are all about the exponential transmission, every small decrease compounds to a much greater decrease in the future.

galaxyLogic 5y ago
Great and subtle point we must reduce the spread before it gets too big, Not after that. It is like the story of a boy who saw a hole in the damn and put his finger in it to stop it. There was not much water passing through such a small hole. But the boy was smart and realized if he let the water run through the hole, the hole would fast grow bigger and bigger so the whole damn would soon break. When the levee breaks mama you got to go.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

alexggordon 5y ago

All due respect but this comment demonstrates a naive understanding of COVID and mask mandates. It's possible this comment is just trolling as it's the only comment your account has made but I'll attempt to address the issues with it regardless. First, calculating a theoretical number of deaths through end result statistics does not result in a number that can be used to support a logical argument. When approximating deaths for something like COVID, the things that matter are: 1. The fatality rate of COVID, assuming the hospital you're treated at has sufficient means to treat you. 2. The fatality rate of COVID, assuming the hospital you're treated at does NOT have sufficient means to treat you. 3. The contagiousness/ability of the virus and likelihood that you'll spread the virus to someone else once you've contracted it (R naught). Basically, think of this as the number of people you'll infect if you get the virus. 4. The number of people in a population who can be infected by an individual at any specific time (effective reproduction number) You can't just take a slice of time and say "6" people will die, and remove mask mandates, as COVID spreads through exponential growth. The benefits of wearing a mask compound, just like not wearing mask compounds in a worse way. Think of it this way. If the R naught of a virus is above 1, (say 1.1) then the virus will continue to spread. If it continues to infect more and more people, unchecked, it will eventually infect almost everyone. If it infects everyone, with a fatality rate of 1.6% in Missouri, it will kill thousands, not 6. The ways available to us to stop COVID are to attack all facets mentioned above. I won't go into all of them, as mask mandates solely aim to curb 3. The goal of mask mandates is to make it so if you have the virus, you infect less than 1 person, so that the virus stops spreading.[1] But the benefits affect all the above, such as, if the virus continues to spread (R naught above 1), then eventually we run out of hospital capacity. If we run out of hospital capacity, the death rate skyrockets, as many preventable deaths are no longer preventable. So, mask mandates now also potentially benefit healthcare capacity (flatten the curve, remember?). So, to specifically isolate the issue with your argument, the number of cases per 100k with and without masks doesn't matter if the virus is still spreading. If it's still spreading, it will still infect everyone eventually, and take its 1.6% of the population at the end of the day. Mask mandates are one component (on top of vaccines, social distancing, hygiene, etc) to lowering the R naught below 1. So, is it reasonable, to impose a mandate such as this that negatively alters people daily life to this extent, in order to prevent tens of thousands of deaths in the all-state from dying? The answer is yes. [0] Good introduction to R naught and R_e https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/ [1] Thorough review of mask wearing statistics and benefits https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/4/e2014564118.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/4/e2014564118.full.pdf [2] A better introduction to modeling COVID 19 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9

Pxtl 5y ago

6 cases can be the difference between an R value > 1 or < 1, resulting in positive or negative growth. Remember geometric growth is in play.

ldehaan 5y ago

Hey another brain user, so nice to see others with braincells that function. One day you might even get voted down to the cool kids table, but you have to tell a bunch of helpless nerds with no life experience how the world works as they cower under their desks and click the down button until the bad man can't be seen.