I don’t know who this is directed to our what it is supposed to mean.
I personally don’t care if you wear a mask or not, nor do I care if your closer than six feet, nor do I care if my shopping cart is sanitized . But I wear a mask so you won’t get my germs and more importantly so that you’ll feel safe, It’s just common courtesy.
I think it is not the first time I write this, but I am going to repeat it anyway. I think it is quite simple: This is one of the few and far between cases when doing what is good for you, doing what is good for the community and for society and doing what is decent and sensible coincide. SO DO IT! Wear a mask whenever you could be infected by asymptomatic carriers around you and wear a mask whenever you, should you unknowingly be an asymptomatic carrier, could infect others.
Except the barrel is pointed at other people, so the person doesn’t really care.
Replying to Cartoonverse:
People obey the laws when they feel like it.
“Ask what you can do for your country!” The answer is wear a mask or stay home and watch Netflix. If that’s the only sacrifice your country asks of your generation, count yourself lucky.
Because the cost and trouble of wearing a spacesuit is far beyond the offsetting risk. N95 masks are hard to come by.
You engage in many, many behaviours meant to offset risk, so don’t think you’re fooling anyone.
I think the problem is that the danger is too far removed from many people. Unless they see people dropping around them, they don’t feel the immediacy of the situation. The cooperation with the blackouts in London were because bombs were falling throughout the city and everyone was in the thick of it. When you’re in Wyoming and don’t know anyone who’s sick, that immediacy is lacking. Even in my area in Seattle, there is a fair amount of people who just don’t know anyone who’s been hit, and they see the danger as an abstract.
We have had epidemics before. We have not had masks during those epidemics.
I did wear a mask when I went on the BLM support march, and so did most of the other people, probably ALL of the other people. And frankly it freaked me out. I don’t like hanging out in groups of masked people. I think the whole thing has been overblown, and I am by no means a right-winger. I am really distressed at the idea that people in the US are now going to be wearing masks forever, out of fear.
Keep in mind that many improvised masks provide very little protection for you. The studies about masks seem to be with good fabrics properly worn and well-fitting masks. With the inferior fabrics and sloppy mask fit of some people, it’s almost like they are not wearing a mask at all.
Certainly any mask can help, but don’t overestimate the benefit of a random mask on someone’s face. You should protect yourself by wearing a mask sufficient for the risk you will face in the environment. It’s clear we are not going to get a sufficient number of Americans to wear masks, wear masks of suitable fabrics, or wear masks properly in order to create safe public spaces. You should treat every public environment as contaminated. If your mask is not sufficient for being in a contaminated environment, get a better mask or don’t go there.
Trying to wrap my brain around how these numbers seem “overblown,” even if you don’t know anyone personally affected YET. I’d really like to understand. Can you explain?
I can explain why I think it’s overblown, yes.
One, the numbers we are getting, in my local area, indicate a certain number of deaths which apparently are considered an exceptional number. However, the number of obituaries reported in the local daily is about the same as last year.
Two, I don’t personally know anyone who’s had it, although I don’t know very many people so that’s nothing. But also, only one person I know knows someone who’s had it, and I have to say that’s several degrees of separation. (Person recovered and is now fine.) This is not to say I want people I know to get it. I don’t.
I mean, if we were trying to let this thing burn itself out and disappear, these restrictions and even more severe ones would make sense. We were too late for that (if it was even possible in the first place). But we were trying to flatten the curve. Well, it’s flattened. What is the point now?
To help reduce the number of critically ill or dead we should all be willing to wear a mask and do much more. It’s a pandemic and our response and preparedness for it has been astonishingly lacking.
We should be working feverishly to mitigate the damage of Covid while preparing for a deliberate biological attack. Unfortunately, we are too fractured to do what’s best for a nation.
However, the number of obituaries reported in the local daily is about the same as last year.
Newspaper obituaries: If you mean the paid notices, they’re bought by family members. The number of paid obituaries bought doesn’t mean a whole lot, especially when families haven’t even figured out where or when to hold services in these isolated times. Nonpaid newspaper death notices usually only include newsworthy people, so it’s not likely those will increase much.
Not sure where you live that the curve has been flattened. It’s rising precipitously many places.
Thanks for the reply.
What needscoffee said: obituaries cost money and they are expensive. When my husband died, I only put the notice in the paper for one day, because I contacted people in other ways. Our local paper doesn’t print death notices any more-- haven’t for ages-- because of privacy. You can’t really go by obits, but do look for your local COVID numbers.
The county where I live has a population of just over 2 million. Right now we have 8,800 COVID cases, but this has increased by ~2,000 in just a week. There are hundreds of new cases every day. We’ve “only” had 100 deaths. 
Maybe you’ve read that this is a very unpleasant disease that attacks many organ systems (not just the lungs, as was originally thought), and people who don’t die can be very ill for a very long time. Elderly who don’t die may never fully recover.
I for one, do not want to get this. And with the number of new cases we’re seeing here every day, I could get it if I’m not careful. Lots more young people are getting it because, well, they don’t feel threatened by it, and dare I say, they probably think the numbers are ahem overblown.
All of this has happened around the world since mid-March, just over three months ago. The term “wildfire” springs to mind.
I still can’t bring myself to see it as overblown and you will be very fortunate if COVID never gets any closer to you personally than it has so far. I hope your judgment of overblown is validated by your personal experience.
To answer the question in the title:
If it would somehow get rid of the virus and therefore mean there was no need to wear masks, I would kill 14 people. It would suck for those 12 people and those who know them, and I would rightly go to jail, but it seems a net win for everybody else.
You forgot the /sarcasm/ notation in your post.
In fairness, please be sure to be in your 12 that die. Do.Not.Volunteer.Me.
Indeed. Very curious to find out what part of the United States is referred to as “flattening the curve”. The rise has been precipitous and the decline meager at best. There’s no curve. There’s the low desert, the steep hillside, and the High Desert. There ain’t no valley on the other side.
There’s just a wholotta death up there on the plateau.
You’re absolutely correct. If they don’t personally see the bodies, it’s hard to take it seriously.
Interestingly, wearing masks was a thing during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. And they faced similar challenges to getting people to wear them and wear them correctly. Also, the type of masks worn then were not sufficient for the tiny size of the flu virus.
I would also be interested in you listing the epidemics that we had that we did not wear masks that overwhelmed our hospitals.
I accept there’s a psychological hurdle to seeing everyone wearing masks. We expect to be able to see faces, so having them covered can be unnerving.
Yes, and that’s also what’s so very frustrating. Even at work, where wearing a mask is “required”, enforcement is lax to nonexistent. I see too many people not wearing them, or wearing them as chingaurds instead of covering their faces, or leaving their nose open so they can breathe and not fog up their glasses. Hey, I wear glasses, too. But if you are wearing it around your throat, you might as well be wearing it on your wrist.
The curve is most decidedly not flattened. It is sharply on the upswing in many areas like Texas (where I live), Florida, Arkansas, California, and Arizona. You know all those places that fought shutting down and rushed to reopen? Yeah, all those places are seeing dramatic increases. And those upswings are precisely because people aren’t wearing masks and stopped social distancing. “Gotta go to the bar, man, who cares about the covid?” Swarming water parks and lakes and beaches.
So which 2 people would it not suck for?