It's about doing your part to break the chains of transmission. The disease inflicts a high cost and also stresses our health care system. The main reason for trying to cooperate with efforts to slow the spread down is to avoid becoming a vector.
Or the mask thing. I think I may have written this before but this society supports laws requiring wearing seat belts and law throwing people in jail if they get caught driving with BAC >0.08. Seat belt laws save an estimated 15,000 per year. In 2001 people were arguing for nationwide 0.08 BAC laws by saying they would save something like 1,200 lives per year (see https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/does- ... 8-bac-laws). Again: That's per YEAR.
In October, it was estimated that universal mask usage in the United States would save 130,000 lives by February. See https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/23/uni ... tudy-says/. That's four months.
Yes. We are going to throw people in jail and make their lives miserable having to blow into devices to use the cars, etc.if they go to their daughter's wedding and have enough champagne to raise their BAC to 0.08 and happen to get stopped while driving 10 miles to get back to their house in order to to save like 1,200 lives per year from traffic accidents but we are going to say that telling somebody to wear a mask in public is this HUGE infringement when everybody wearing a mask in public would save about 100 times and many lives.
Many of the same people who want to throw the book at somebody caught driving with 0.08 think we should have a revolution over telling somebody to wear a mask when they go into a supermarket where all those poor supermarket employees have to sit there all day with people they don't know anything about coming in and we are in the midst of the worst pandemic in over a century.
The saddest thing for me, as a conservative, is that this stupidness is mostly coming from conservatives. Just reinforcing the justifiable perception that "conservative" = "idiot."








