Links tagged “masks”

Chomsky claimed that people who oppose wearing masks are an “epidemic” in American politics, more concerned about protecting their freedoms than following science:

“I mean, do you have an individual right to take an assault rifle and go to the supermarket or mall and start shooting randomly?” he questioned. “That’s what it means not to wear a mask. It’s a strange kind of individualism.”

"What if, even after the worst of the pandemic is behind us, face masks continue to be used as a tool in managing public health during the regular flu season, which the World Health Organization says kills as many as 650,000 people a year? ... What if we stopped politicizing the face covering, which has been maligned as a muzzle and a violation of civil liberties, and normalize the mask as simply an effective barrier to keep our harmful germs in, and deadly particle pollution out?"

"From a global production projection of 52 billion masks for 2020, we estimate that 1.56 billion masks will enter our oceans in 2020, amounting to between 4,680 and 6,240 metric tonnes of plastic pollution. These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down and all the while serve as a source of micro plastic and negatively impact marine wildlife and ecosystems."

Another objection: "Well, we can never know for certain HOW MUCH WORSE it could have been without masks." First, that's not science - that's unfalsifiable nonsense.
Maybe consider that the virus is beyond your control.

New York Daily News Excerpt: "Idaho public health commissioners had to shut down their meeting and scramble home because of coordinated pro-coronavirus protests across the Boise area."

"I expect that wearing a mask will become part of my daily life, moving forward, even after a vaccine is deployed," Amy Hobbs, a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Times.

Michael Webster-Clark of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said he expected "further relaxation of most precautions by mid-to-late summer 2021" following widespread availability of the vaccine.

Marilyn Tseng, an assistant professor at California Polytechnic State University, said life would never revert to the way it was, though the preventative measures currently practiced—masks and social distancing—will feel "normal" in time. Similarly, Vasily Vlassov, a professor at HSE University in Moscow, said life was perfectly normal now because this is the new normal.

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Reason's ROBBY SOAVE: " Everyone has a right to dissent from the epidemiologists' contentment with the way things are now...Epidemiologists are free to take whatever precautions they deem necessary in their own lives, of course—as are the rest of us. But for too long, their pessimistic dictates have provided cover for politicians and government employees to make people's lives miserable."