6/26/2020 On Facemasks and Lockdowns in the Age of the Virus. Maybe.

I haven't been outspoken one way or another about either the issue of wearing masks in public, or about about forced business closures or government mandated stay at home orders, either. Quite simply, I don't feel personally qualified to say which is right and which is wrong. I have friends who are adamant about both topics, and adamant on both sides of both of them. Yes! Wear masks! No! No Masks! Yes! Stay at home! No! Go out! It's mind boggling. So, even though I admit I'm not an expert, and that I freely admit I'm not qualified to give advice on either issue, here is what I think.

On masks: if we all wear the right masks it seems logical to me that transmission of this virus will be reduced. Well, we aren't ALL wearing them, and MOST of us aren't wearing the right masks. Yesterday when I was tested for the CCP Virus, the guy in front of me online was clearly sick. His wife said he'd had a fever for 2 days. He was wearing a mask and so was I. I was still scared shitless just to be in line with him. I guess that told me that deep down I don't have confidence the mask will protect me. On the other hand, if I wasn't wearing a mask, surely I'd have left. What I did do was avoid standing anywhere within 10 feet of him, and I avoided standing downwind of him, too. At one point the guy behind me asked me to move up closer to the sick guy so that he could get into a tree-shaded spot near in front of me. I said, "Sorry, the guy in front odf me is sick, and I'm not moving any closer to him than I have to." He didn't argue. So, I'm not going to tell you to wear a mask or to not wear one. I don't know that the shitty non-medical grade masks we're mostly all wearing help much. I put them in the 'better than nothing' category. They may even be 'barely better than nothing'. But if you have yours on and I have mine on, I'm going to say it's better than nothing.

As for the stay at home and close your businesses orders from the various states, I've withheld criticism for the most part. But here's where I will be critical: they told us we were flattening the curve to protect hospital and medical assets from being overwhelmed and rendered comletely ineffectual due to lack of capacity, staff, and equipment/supplies. And for the most part, with the exception of some hospitals in New York (not all of them, SOME of them), this was effective. But somewhere along the line the 15 days to flatten the curve turned into months, and it became obvious that we weren't flattening the curve anymore, we were waiting for a vaccine or a cure. I don't know that we'd have been so readily willing to comply with closures and stay at home orders initially if they said it was for months, maybe a year, until there is a vaccine or a cure. If you were to ask me if I thought they were doing the right thing, I'd have answered "Maybe." Why maybe?

Because if I had to say what I thought we should have done and what should we be doing, stipulating that I agree that I am NOT as qualified as people making arguments for or against lockdowns, closures, and stay at home orders, my vote would be to protect people with higher than average risk to this virus: elderly, people with one or more co-morbidities, etc., and let the rest of the people carry on with their lives until we reached herd immunity. I have my doubts whether the lockdowns saved all that many lives, or if they just delayed the inevitable. I guess that's partly because they were sold to us as flattening the curve, not waiting for a vaccine or cure. But, I admit I'm a layman, and I have heard experts advocate both sides of this, and each case was made convincingly. Mostly they're argueing for or against lockdowns. I've seen very few proposing targeted measures that protect the vulnerable and let life go on otherwise, although the case I heard for it was the one that swayed my opinion best of all of them.

One last simple observation about the debate about both masks and social restrictions: it's amazing how clean the break is on issues related to the pandemic, especially on lockdowns, but on the masks, too, to some extent. My leftward leaning friends are pretty much uniformly for the restrictions and from the right the opposite. My simple explanation for that is that my friends on the left are far more comfortable relying on government for their safety and well being than those on the right are. To the left it's the government's job to look after us and protect us. My friends on the right tend more toward, "Don't tell me what to do, I'll take care of me, you take care of you, and I'll take my own risks, thank you very much." Oddly, neither side seems to be arguing for or against the approach of protect the vulnerable, let life go on for the rest of us, and we'll reach herd immunity sooner. The position I like best. So, as long as nobody's arguing for or against my preferable course of action, I'll just continue to scroll past most of your debates on it when I see them. Maybe.