Anyway, my opinions on this... masks ...
Masks are a relatively low-impact, low-cost, and low-risk measure, especially if they're only mandated inside shops and regional public transport. Yes, wearing them for many hours can be a serious strain especially combined with physical exertion ... and there are real situations were they can cause problems, see Baracus' post.
I think the data and observations point clearly in the direction that they are an important contribution to controlling the pandemic.
But let's assume that turns out to be a smaller contribution than at first believed.
How much damage is done by wearing masks? How much freedom is lost?
On the other hand, if we ditch the masks, and it turns out they are
more important than expected, and we get new waves of covid roaring back...
...then there will have to be hard lockdowns again?
That does much more damage inevitably, and is much more of a restriction of freedoms.
In general of course there are going to be different concepts of what 'freedom' means.
For instance, if it's
me wearing a mask that means
other people have to worry less about me possibly spreading
my infectious droplets in their direction (I might be infected with not knowing it).
That means I help to contribute to the freedom of others by wearing a mask - for instance, vulnerable people may have more freedom to move and interact if everyone is making sure the air isn't saturated with covidated droplets.
And if we all stick to it and avoid a second wave we are all increasing each other's practical freedoms.
Freedom can be seen as a purely individual thing,
'I want to have all options of action for myself, hell or high water ' or it can be seen as a more societal thing, '
I want to go through life without being damaged or crushed by actions of those who exert their options without respect for others'. I clearly tend toward the latter, opinions may vary.
if you already chose a side, and for whatever reason your side decides if it's good or bad to do certain things, you just adopt that stance
With regards to the Covid situation, we also see that this can happen from opposite political perspectives.
Sweden has deliberately chosen to open its population to a herd-immunity approach, based on a progressive ideology. Basically any government that feels it does not need to be accountable to any authority outside of its own, and insulates itself from contradicting viewpoints either through narcissism of the leaders or ideological closed-mindedness of the ruling class can go down a rabbit-hole.
It is clear they knew at the time that that was a lie. They said it to avoid a run on masks. But when you are the "authority" the "scientists" and you openly lie, are you surprised when three months later some people don't believe you?
This was a problem with the initial communication about the pandemic in Germany too.
Originally the tone was that the 'novel coronavirus' is 'just like the flu' and people who were concerned about it were only 'Panikmacher' (panic-mongers) who were motivated by xenophobia. A while later the risk was accepted as real but masks were condemned as being less than useless, - they woudn't protect 'cvilians,' it was also claimed that the normal citizen would increase their risk of infection by wearing them, the idea of protecting others was not accepted at all. This changed toward late April when citizens where told they should start sewing masks in order to donate them to healthcare facilities; in my state, the government actually offered kits for making masks at home. By the time of the relaxations in May the swerve to '
wear masks in order to protect others' was completed, and so the communication had caught up to what informed opinion had been from the beginning.
The reason for this is clear -- the government understood that masks were necessary, however they could not be provided in timely fashion because our economy didn't have the production capacity ... almost all the capacity was in China and they weren't selling at the time, for obvious reasons.
Admitting this would have meant losing face as it would have brought into light some side effects of 'globalisation' i.e. the creation of extreme dependency on single sources for simple items that nevertheless could suddenly become strategically important. However admitting that the prevalent economic ideology could have any downsides to it, is a no-go and needs to be avoided.
So instead of admitting '
we need masks but can't make them' the communication strategy was '
say masks are useless and even counterproductive until exactly the point when we suddenly pivot and say they're mandatory, ... and that point will come exactly when we've figured out the supply issues'.
That is of course rather contemptuous of the public and only contributes to incubating distrust.
So they require protective measures, not only for themselves, but also to be implemented to everybody, mandatory.
I do see 'wear masks in a small fraction of your daily life interactions' as a relatively low-cost thing, not comparable to the notion of letting a small group of activists redesign the entire economy... it's a question of risk management, accepting a small cost to perhaps blunt a large threat, and if the measure does turn out to be ineffective, it can be dropped with no irreversible damage done. Lockdowns are far more coercive and costly than mask-wearing.
I think such a taboo about wearing a mask is mostly a regional thing, because it doesn't exist where I live and I believe it's more or less the same in many other Asian countries. Also, I believe that such defensive or agressive behaviours are present on the both sides of the fence, like it is the case with pretty much every other social and political issues.
For instance, there have been numerous instances of those who wear masks getting ridiculed
That's how I see it here too. In the time before masks were officially endorsed it would be almost exclusively people of East Asian descent, or couples where one partner was East Asian, who could be seen wearing masks in supermarkets etc. Social shaming worked against mask-wearing outside of that group, as if it was an '
anti-European act' to wear a mask. I was an early dissenter there and was definitely looked at as a bit of an oddball. The truth is that the decisive time to wear them was in March, when infections were quickly growing. Also both my son and I had a respiratory ailment in early March which I'd wager wasn't Covid but how would I have known? - that was the point when I decided to self-quarantine, and also start wearing the masks I'd bought in early February. I certainly didn't damage anybody's freedom with that...
) but that doesn't prevent some people from being self-righteous and aggressive in pushing that agenda.
