The questions in my mind are:
1 is masking among the general public really necessary;
2 "cost benefit of masks"
3 what about individual autonomy (always a foremost concern in my mind);
1. You admit that its effective. We have evidence it is. We need to control transmission. Masks seem the least costly, easiest, yet effective techniques to cut transmission.
2. Yes, in fact, there have been a few analyses that show they both save lives and money. AND what would the consequences of the alternative methods of control?
3. Temporarily having to mask in social situations is only slightly more intrusive than laws requiring a certain amount of clothing.
We have similar levels of libertarian outlook, except in a public health crisis it would appear. What you keep missing here:
What is the alternative?
Without masks, controlling transmission rates requires more draconian action like further increasing contract tracing, isolation orders, and societal/economic restrictions.
Masks are the lesser of temporary evils.
lastly, is trying to stop the spread really the best strategy to begin with, vs. instead focusing on protecting the minority of the population who is likely to develop severe disease
Communities full of multigenerational households, health workers, diabetics, old people, obese people.... the minority with significant risk factors is large.
You understand public use of masks is
source control, then in the next breath imply we can end universal masking while still protecting the most susceptible? We have a disease with significant cryptic transmission and long incubation... so how do you keep all the people who interact with the huge "minority of the population" from being infected? Or the people who interact with them? And on and on?
and allowing those who are at very little risk to be exposed naturally and develop herd immunity?
See my post above. We are nowhere near it, we don't even know how durable immunity is, and we cannot hope to isolate the more vulnerable part of the population while infection burns through the rest.
Especially considering that the more we learn about it, the less deadly we are finding out it is on a per-case basis.
Maybe IFR is not the 5% that initial Chinese data shows, but the morbidity, mortality, disability, and cost of disease is vastly higher than seasonal influenza.
The officials have been wrong about pretty much everything they've told us since day 1. They've changed most of their recommendations at least once, been inconsistent and self-contradictory in their messaging in general,
No, not everything. Yea, there has been some **** messaging, some of it even disingenuous (CDC on public masking, WHO on a lot).
Other things change as we know more, as you would expect with a novel pathogen driven pandemic that arose in a communist nation that suppresses and alters information to save face.
and every prediction has failed to come true.
While there were some wild models out there, the predicted outcomes were the motivation to take action. Actions avoided many of the predicted the outcomes. You cast that as a failure of prognostication rather than a success of mitigation.
We HAVE managed, however, to beat the hell out of our economy, massively increase our federal debt, create record unemployment, destroy many, many businesses, force the cancellation of countless weddings, graduations, family vacations, and funerals, seen a huge spike in suicides, a huge spike in mortgage defaults, etc, etc.
Yes. And it is tragic. The cost is real and atrocious. If only we had acted earlier and with more determination and coordination, and been better prepared on the whole, some or much could have been avoided.
All that, and it isn't even clear that any of the lockdown and social distancing orders were really necessary or all that effective.
You can place your personal valuation of cost vs benefit in here, and you can compare not doing the draconian things to countries where the fire burned much hotter and see... but to argue that it was not effective is a mind boggling claim that I'd love to see you defend... unless you mean the haphazard, political stunted way in which we executed it piecemeal caused a dilution in effectiveness.
