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Why Masks? Because Powerless Citizens Rarely Emerge.
Why masks? I think the answer to that is fairly simple, and fairly obvious as well.
I have just finished — much to my dismay — reading the 20th and final (not including the unfinished 21st) book in Patrick O’Brian’s amazing Aubrey/Maturin “Master and Commander” series. In a recent book, Steven Maturin discusses an old sailor who he is treating. He knows exactly what the problem is, and he treats it as best he can. But he notes that the sailor is absolutely convinced that the problem stems from the consumption of meat and alcohol. Therefore, the sailor self-prescribes total abstinence from these two things. Maturin comments that sailors are stubborn, especially with respect to their own health, and that the abstinence does no great harm, so he goes on treating the sailor as he would, and he doesn’t argue with him about the diagnosis. Later in the book, the sailor dies, as Steven knew he would.
This is partly why everyone is wearing masks. People are stubborn when it comes to things that are unknown and over which we have no power. Irreligious people are especially stubborn in this respect, and we live in a particularly irreligious time and place.
At the beginning of this pandemic, our politicians acted. Of course, they acted. They couldn’t just stand there. They acted on the best information they had, which was terrible, and they acted in the only way they could, which was clumsy, overbroad, and devastating. The more we know, the more we are learning that it is quite possible that these actions, for all their costs, were certainly ill-advised (on balance), and even without their costs, may have been almost entirely ineffective for their stated purpose.
But a terrified public went along. They were told that death waits around every corner and that the only way to beat it is to hide in their homes. They hid in their homes, obsessively refreshing their Twitter and Facebook feeds, eyes glued to the television. And deaths piled up in spite of the fact that they were all obediently cowering in their homes.
There is no way out of that.
The truth would be to say that, well, we were wrong. That is a phrase that appears in no government handbook ever printed, and in no media guide ever consulted. We were wrong. As far as we can tell, the outcomes resulting from this virus were inevitable and unavoidable — we may have mitigated them somewhat (especially by keeping people out of hospitals), and, then again, we may also have simply traded one harm for another. We’ll never know the outcome of that impossible balance between “lives saved” as a result of our actions, and “lives lost” as a result of our actions.
But there is still no way out. My local hospital lied to the public when it said that we would be overrun with COVID-19 deaths by April 8, and would be turning people away to die in their homes or in the streets. This was a noble lie because a terrified citizenry is most likely to be complacent. It wasn’t just my hospital, it was nationwide. Instant death lurks around every corner. Anyone could have it and is likely contagious. Even you. You probably have it and you don’t even know that you have it. Not only is instant death lurking around every corner, but instant death emanates from your very being.
Turns out we were wrong. This is a virus, and it is worse than some other viruses that we are used to, and it is not as bad as some other pandemics that we have experienced. It is dangerous for some, and we really do now have a pretty decent grasp on who those people are. It is either widespread and not very deadly, or it is not very widespread and pretty deadly … or, it is becoming more and more widespread, and less and less deadly. But it cannot be all of these things. Death is not lurking around every corner, and it is extremely unlikely that you have it, and even less likely that you will give it to someone else. It is even less likely that you will get it when you pass by your neighbor on the street or in a store, or when you eat at a restaurant or play in a park or go to the beach or earn money at your job or barbeque with your friends or watch your kids play baseball. It is less dangerous for children than most dangers they face on a daily basis (even at home!) and there is virtually no evidence that it spreads from children to adults, or even from children to one another.
There is still much that we don’t know. But what we do know is that we were wrong. Our CDC guidelines were wrong and continue to be wrong. Our models were unbelievably wrong, and they are only getting worse. Our politicians were wrong. Our Twitter and Facebook feeds were wrong.
And that’s why we need masks. We are not willing to admit that we were wrong. We are not prepared to accept that we were powerless and that we continue to be powerless. We are not about to crawl out from under the house simply because somebody tells us that we were mistaken to crawl down there to begin with. We cannot just stand there, knowing how little we know – we must do something! We must exercise control, and if we don’t have control, we must exercise what little control we can muster, even if it is only control over our own behavior.
The rationale for that behavior is itself filled with contradictions. If the virus is so contagious that masks will help prevent its spread, then we are too late to start wearing masks, and if it truly is that contagious, then “running its course” is the best and only thing we should be doing. If it is not so contagious that masks will help prevent its spread, then we are wearing the masks just for fun. Same thing is true if asymptomatic aerosolized spread is not a meaningfully important mode of transmission, even if such a thing is scientifically possible in some circumstances.
Even the best case for masks seems to be a pretty silly one. There is a small percentage of people infected; there is a smaller percentage asymptomatic; there is a smaller percentage asymptomatic and contagious; and there is a possibility that the subgroup within that subgroup may possibly sneeze, which is about the only thing cloth masks are designed to mitigate, and even then, they mitigate only slightly, so that at the end of the day, what masks accomplish is the slight reduction of contagion that could possibly come from the small percentage of asymptomatic contagious within the small percentage of asymptomatic within the small percentage of infected. But to be absolutely safe, we need to make laws that cover everyone. No, it’s not just like using a chain-link fence to catch mosquitoes, it’s like using TNT to catch a minnow when the minnow really wasn’t your problem to begin with. But, we’re not really concerned with the minnow. We are concerned with human nature.
Masks are the placebo that allows us to feel like we are still in control of a situation where all of the evidence tells us that we have never been in control. If you are the CDC or a politician and saying “sorry, I was wrong” is simply out of the question, it is essential that you have a plan (for, as we know, all smart people have plans, so if you want to be smart, you must first have a plan). If there is one thing a patient most dreads — and which most patients simply will not accept — it is to walk away from the doctor empty-handed, without a plan. Virtually all doctors know and understand this. Doctors in the 18th century understood this very well, especially where sailors were concerned.
I have heard and read interviews with doctors … fear is debilitating. It is not all of these doctors who have stoked and built and endlessly perpetuated that fear. But they do understand that fear is debilitating, and they have not lost the wisdom of Steven Maturin.
Should I wear a mask?
Sure, why not. If it will make you feel better.
Published in General
And failing to prepare is preparing to fail. A 2nd wave isn’t inevitable but refusing to take sensible measures will greatly increase the chance it occurs-and with it a Biden presidency.
BTW-over 1/3 of nursing home stays are short…but thanks to Cuomo that percentage has gone up
Also, for what it’s worth, China is a very good example, and most Asian countries are not much different. When I see workers spaced out in factories, all dressed the same, all eating the same lunch, all faceless… I hate what I see. When I see thousands of soldiers marching in lockstep, again, faceless, flanked on all sides by party members, all soluting and all, again, faceless, I hate what I see.
And when I see pictures of crowded Asian cities full of people wearing masks, I think about how much I value my individuality and my liberty and my face.
As a person who was rather vocal against Trump in the primaries, and who doesn’t care much for him now, I very much resent that this has become a partisan issue. It should not be.
By all means, prepare away. What we’ve done is not preparation. And if the only preparation we can think of is locking down our citizens and eliminating personal liberty, I’ll prefer the virus, thank you. One man’s sensible measures are another man’s tyranny. That’s why the United States exists.
I hear China is very safe these days.
I won’t live like those who live in China.
I thought the thread was on masks-when did it become about lockdowns? That is a separate issue. You have had mandated car insurance, health insurance, draft registration…and you are going to the mattresses over wearing a mask to save the economy & the lives of our citizens? You should pick a better hill to make your stand-b/c masks work, are cheap…etc. The risk benefit ratio is way in favor of masks. Better to wear a mask and prevent a 2nd wave (with the Biden presidency thrown in). Because if you think that will advance liberty, you are gravely mistaken. But I repeat myself.
I am aware of the fact that the article supports masks. That is why I quoted it. I even read it.
The authors make a lot of claims. They aren’t terribly persuasive, but they are surely claims… I believe I linked you, maybe last week, to another article whose author claimed that masks are more likely to be harmful to your health than to protect you from covid. That guy made a lot of claims, too…
See… We don’t agree about this at all, as I thought would be rather clear.
Maybe we shouldn’t mandate the purchase of insurance, either.
When someone argues that X is bad, it is not a terribly persuasive rejoinder to say that, after all, Y is also bad.
But at some point it was accepted that laws would be passed and enforced that many didn’t like.
And emergency powers were understood and accepted as inevitable. It was called the executive prerogative back then, and Madison wrote about a “legislative prerogative” as well, if I recall correctly. They considered specific restrictions on emergency powers in the Constitution but decided to leave it vague. The concern was that, in a true emergency, the government would have to inevitably stretch or ignore the restriction, often with popular support, and in that way, with language having been openly ignored, the whole constitutional structure would be weakened.
If you have a constitutional structure in place, if the measures are not arbitrary but rationally related to a real issue, if the legislature remains in session, the governor is answerable to the people, answerable to the press, the courts are open, then these kinds of things, as along as they don’t morph into something else, are not tyranny. Not as the founders would have understood it, anyway. When the King and Parliament closed Boston harbor to punish the colonists, to teach them a lesson about their place in the empire, to remind them they were pawns in a bigger game, that was tyranny. If local elected officials had closed Boston harbor to prevent the arrival of a dangerous disease, that would have the same practical business impact, but would not have been tyrannical. Local quarantines for yellow fever outbreaks and other diseases were not unknown back then. There was a lot of telling people what they could and could not do back in those days, even on the Patriot side of things. The Continental Army was authorized, on at least a few occasions, to seize private property without compensation to keep itself supplied.
Nothing in the Constitution prevents state quarantines in the present context and the other structures are there to keep them from becoming a tool of tyrants. This structure seems to be holding up well in the current crisis.
How about extending said quarantine because people complained that it wasn’t necessary? Tyranny?
Depends on the reason for the extension. If it’s just a dispute on the best policy, then it’s probably not tyranny and the governor, or whichever local officials imposed the quarantine, will be accountable when the next election comes up. If the extension is made to advance the governor’s private business concerns, or to serve a certain political ideology, and the disease is merely a pretext to that purpose, then I would say it is tyranny.
Bad policy does not equal tyranny. Harmful policy does not equal tyranny. In fact, good, beneficial policies might be nonetheless tyrannical. Tyranny is about the relationship between the government and the governed, and really depends on the context.
You think it is holding up well? May I refer you to my previous post on the matter?
This “quarantine” is nothing like any quarantine we have ever seen. The perceived threat is far less than others we have endured.
If DA means you are a lawyer, I am surprised by your understanding of the constitution. The constitution does not “prevent,” it “authorizes,” and nothing in the constitution authorizes the response we are currently experiencing. The default position is “lacks authorization.”
My state actually does have a statute that defines emergency powers, and undoubtedly our supreme court will read a great deal into it, which will be permanent.
I am not saying that we are living under tyranny. I am saying that, in exchange for the feeling of some nominal reduction of risk, and not on evidence but on hunches and theories and “hedged bets,” we are voluntarily relinquishing those rights of ours, which are designed to guard against tyranny. That is more important than you acknowledge when you ask me to not get my panties in a bundle over minor inconveniences.
Read what I said again. “Because people complained”. I’m talking about punishment.
Process exists for a reason. When governors declare “emergencies,” they suspend that process, with the justification being that debate and presentation of evidence and legislative protections of minority views… those things take time, and emergencies require decisive action where time is of the essence. If an “emergency” lasts for months or years, it is no longer an emergency.
When pearl harbor or the twin towers were attacked, immediate decisive action was necessary, and almost as immediately, process was resumed.
Democrats (and any other would-be tyrants) long for “emergencies” because these powers shut off debate, silence critics, and trample minority opinion.
This virus may be a tragedy, but it is not an emergency. Those who wish to maintain a state of emergency indefinitely, as “the new normal,” are, if you’ll pardon the term, exercising tyrannical impulses.
I don’t mind debating public health. I do mind that process is suspended, even if, this far, that power has been used only to silence opposition to “bad policy.”
I’m not at all convinced the threat is one that can be so casually dismissed. At any rate, we have endured longer and more severe deprivations of liberty in worse emergencies.
DA are my initials, but as it happens I am a lawyer, and I’m confident my understanding of the Constitution is sound.
If I’m not mistaken it prohibits some things, and authorizes others. For example, among probably hundreds, if not thousands of prohibitions once you get into case law, it prohibits someone under 35 from serving as President and it prohibits bills which raise revenue from becoming law if they originate in the Senate. On the other hand, it authorizes the President to veto legislation and it authorizes Congress to declare war. More relevant to my areas of practice, it prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and authorizes a Bankruptcy code. So, I’m fairly certain it does both with great regularity.
I don’t think it’s the size of the inconvenience that determines the tyrannical quality of the government act.
Sorry, I misunderstood. Yes, if the purpose of the extension is a punishment, that seems tyrannical to me.
Good to hear it. :)
As for the limits of the constitution, you can only limit what you have already authorized. If presenting a case against recent government action, I’d more likely argue that the governor does not meet the criteria under the enabling statute, rather than that his powers are limited by the constitution.
I’d probably also get into due process and separation of powers…
But it is not a pandemic, it never was, all of that was mis-stated. Governors insisting that areas in their states cannot open unless mask wearing is accepted by the public have been found to have some very strange behaviors underlying their decision. So you have Gov Gavin Newsom signing off on a one billion dollar contract with a Chinese firm to have them produce and ship the masks to Calif. It turns out that these masks ended up being defective. It is too late for us citizens as Newsom had already decreed that we must become mask wearers.
The requirement that is lined up directly behind mask wearing is contact tracing.
Ironically, the WHO released a document in 2019 stating under no circumstances should contract tracing be used. The document, reported on by independent researcher Kenny Palurintano, details WHO’s views on Non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) in response to a pandemic. In section 6.1, “Contact Tracing,” under “quality of evidence”, – “There is a very low overall quality of evidence that contact tracing has an unknown effect on the transmission of influenza.” Under the “Executive Summary”, in Table 1, the WHO lists contact tracing under the heading “Not Recommend In Any Circumstances”.
Despite WHO’s own documents invalidating contact tracing, officials in Ventura County heed the call of WHO’s Dr. Michael Ryan. At a May 4 press conference, Ventura County Public Health Director Dr. Robert Levin said those who live in homes where they could expose family members to COVID-19 could be taken away and moved into other health facilities.
“We also realize that as we find more contacts, some people… are going to have trouble being isolated. If they live in a home where there is only one bathroom with other people living there, and those people don’t have COVID infection, we won’t keep the person in that home,” Levin stated. “Every person who we’re isolating, for instance, needs to have their own bathroom. And so we’ll be moving people like this into other kinds of housing that we have available.”
So the real problem with mask wearing when required is that it is only the first step into an increasing totalitarian situation. Today I wear a mask to enter a store I have been entering without a mask since March 13th. Tomorrow my spouse might be separated from me because contact tracers have tested us and found one of us is positive and one negative so for our own good we must be separated. I seem to remember one other period in history where people were separated for their own good. That ended very badly
How is wearing a mask in the month of May and soon June a courtesy? The illness is going to taper off as corona illnesses in general are diminished as the warmer weather does it in. The numbers regarding the lethalness of COVID have been proven wrong. It seems like for those of us who are hearty healthy people getting the disease is going to happen anyway.
People do not need me or you letting them know that COVID has been a serious issue. That seriousness has been so overhyped by the media that those folks who barely passed HS science will probably now be germophobic for the rest of their lives. It might actually be a kindness to demonstrate to others that the overreaction to COVID was indeed just that.
Do you really believe any of that? At all?
Sweden did not lock down and here in the USA in many places we did.
The overall difference? Some 30 deaths per million more in Sweden. (Last time I looked, we stood at 137 deaths per million, while they were at 167.) However their society and their economy stand fully intact.
Here in the USA we are facing some very serious problems, which include a high proportion of small businesses going bust, 39 million people unemployed. Increasing numbers of suicide.
Additionally the one part of society that we need to have up and functioning should there be an actual pandemic around the corner, that is, our hospitals and clinics, have had to shutter their doors, lay people off. Possibly many of these facilities will not be around if and when a real 3.4% mortality across all cases disease does ever hit.
You need to look more often- the USA is at 312 deaths/million and Sweden at 414/million -significantly higher and both numbers will continue to rise. The rise will be worse if we do nothing. We don’t know that summer will blunt the virus(I certainly hope so) but we have good evidence that masks, social distancing, avoiding mass gatherings DOES work. It is unwise to drop methods that do work for one (summer) that is unproven to work. I strongly suspect that summer will help and its effects will be ADDITIVE with masks, social distancing etc. Together they are our best bet to avoid a surge in cases while reopening-which we desperately need to do.
I think there is another factor here that is going to bite at some point. Say the zombie apocalypse virus shows up a few months or years from now, and government officials start saying, we all have to lock down again, until we “flatten the curve”. I would anticipate immediate and widespread civil disobedience, if not outright insurrection. They have fired their shot on lock down for disease control, and I doubt you’ll see the public willing to do anything like this again in any of our lifetimes. When they say there will be millions of deaths, people will say, “that’s what you said last time”.
The benefit to you is we can more safely reopen the economy w/o precipitating a 2nd wave- a huge economic & public health gain (recessions cause depression etc). You personally gain by the improved economy (assuming you aren’t both short selling & talking down the economy) as well as helping others. Mask wearing is particularly helpful b/c many infected people are asymptomatic and there is data that a small %age of people are responsible for a great majority of the spread (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.21.20104521v1).
This.
We used the nuclear option on a disease that, in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t all that deadly (relative to, say, the 1918 flu or the Black Death.)
It remains an open question whether the people will comply with another request to destroy the economy for political gain. Having said that, COVID does demonstrate quite clearly that more Americans are sheep than even I thought, and I’m considered a depressing pessimist by many around these parts.
The uncivil disobedience is just around the corner. Just wait for the next edict from Governor Half Wit or Governor Nit Wit that their state can’t open up because we the people were bad children and couldn’t handle our freedom like our elite betters told us to.
Back to the masks, why are the we must wear a mask people not saying that they should be mandatory forever? 50,000 flu deaths per year mean nothing?
I’ve done some googling, and I haven’t found much because the official guidance is still that you will die if you get within six feet of someone.
I realize the plural of anecdote is not data, but I do know two people that contracted COVID, oddly enough, despite living in the same house, no one else in their household contracted the disease. If living in the same house with someone that is COVID positive doesn’t cause you to contract it, I find it very hard to believe that you can contract it by passing someone for 3 seconds in a grocery store. I think pre-plexiglass screens, you were far more likely to catch COVID from the cashier than another customer, now that plexiglass is everywhere, I think the risks in stores is negligible.
The hard data point we have is the reproductive number, r naught or r t, which was as high as 2 or 2.5. Every person early on that had COVID transmitted to an average of around two people in the four days to weeks that they were communicable. If a person walking through a grocery store would cause everyone that came within six feet of them to contract COVID, the reproductive number would be 50 or 100 or even 1,000 over four days, not two. Yes, there are some “super spreaders”, but they have been in large stationary crowds for extended periods of time, such as funerals, conferences, or parties, not walking through grocery stores killing everyone in the store.
But again, facts don’t matter in this situation, it’s fear that is driving all of this. Any tyrants eat up fear like some people pretzels. There is no ground more fruitful for a tyrant than a fearful populace. I highly recommend Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements for an excellent discussion of how tyrants use fear. Fear is useful to our enemies. There is a fine line between prudence and panic, and we as a society have gone well past that line, and it is going to end badly for all us.
They inevitably will.
If the governor exceeds his authority under the state’s enabling statute, that is a whole different ball of wax. It would not be a federal constitutional claim.
I hesitate to opine on purely hypothetical claims, but I think it would be an uphill battle on the due process claim (assuming you are still talking about mask requirements). You know the balancing test that would be used.
It seems to me, having read your comments and those of the others here, that heart of the dispute is whether this disease constitutes a true emergency. I assume if this virus had a much higher death rate, or had the same rate but had killed 100,000 children, your view of what might legitimate government action might be different. Everyone is making a balancing analysis, is my point, and people can reasonably come to different opinions on that, without the need to divide everyone into panicked sheeple vs. heartless lunatics.
There’s an old episode of Barney Miller they should watch first. They bring in a guy who has been living alone in his apartment for 30 years, hasn’t had any contact with anyone. He therefore has no immunity to anything and is dead within 24 hours. Ramp up all these efforts to prevent contact between people,and there are going to be jokers in the deck.
The main benefit of a mask is that it protects others from spittle you might spray when coughing, sneezing or talking. Wear a mask in consideration of others. Don’t be a dick.
I think the Hammer’s main complaint is a visceral, cultural one. It’s not really about the science of whether masks work. He just doesn’t like the idea of Americans adopting the customs of foreigners. Just the same as if lots of American women starting wearing burkas. It offends him to see Americans reducing themselves to the levels of lesser peoples. I am certainly no fan of multiculturalism. Our culture is important and should be valued and protected. But it’s been proved that masks are effective in this context and we shouldn’t let aesthetic revulsion play any role in whether or not we wear them.