Why are you wearing a mask?

Short answer: it's a nearly effortless way of minimizing the risk of illness.

But getting sick is a normal part of life

It doesn't have to be. Many times in history disease has wiped out several percent of the population. Now that we know it's spread through infectious aerosols and those can be blocked with 50ยข of fabric, why not avoid illness altogether?

There's worse things than getting a sniffle

Despite everyone claiming they "never get sick," the average person falls ill 2-4 times a year. A common cold lasts a week, while the flu or RSV can be a multi-week recovery. Your illness isn't just that day so miserable you had to take off work. All that time spent below baseline adds up to about 10% of each year. You can have it back by covering your face in a few high-risk situations.

If your baseline misery is so high that that years completely free of fever, stuffy nose, and miserable Nyquil nights doesn't appeal to you, this probably isn't for you and you can stop reading.

Wearing a mask shows cowardice

If your profession requires you to project fearlessness like car sales or bar bouncer, the tradeoff of a few extra weeks of health may not be worth the downside of being perceived as weak. Nor may it be if you are concerned about fitting in or fearful of potential conflict, since you will encounter it. That's your choice to make, and if your status or livelihood is in a position to be threatened by those above you against masks, you may decide against it.

It's harder to breathe

A properly fitted 3M 1870+ with waterproof membrane takes some getting used to, but the 9205+ is just as effective and quite breathable. If masks significantly prevented airflow or promoted dangerous ratios of room air gases, surgeons who wore them for 12-hour operations would've sought exemptions decades ago. If your diaphragm is too weak for the extra effort, the breathing difficulties from COVID will be an unpleasant surprise.

So it's not about COVID?

COVID made it socially acceptable to do in the USA what other societies have done for years. While losing weeks a year to minor illness is an unpleasantness worth avoiding on its own, COVID shifted the calculus significantly by being much more contagious, chronic, and deadly than other respiratory diseases. One in 10 infections lingers for months.

COVID is only dangerous for old people

If COVID was only its symptoms, it wouldn't be that bad for most. However, even minor, asymptomatic bouts are known with certainty to reduce brain volume, reduce IQ, and dysregulate T cells in the same way as AIDS, among many other effects. Infections may permanently deplete young people's resilience in the same way as the elderly, going unnoticed because of their reserves, only to reappear later in life. MIS-C and children being 30% more likely to become type 1 diabetic after COVID both hint at this possibility.

There is no rule that the damage done by an illness must be proportional to the symptoms felt, as any diabetic can tell you. Nor is it an immutable law of nature that more contagious diseases are less deadly, a heuristic we learned from comparing colds to cancers. This happens over time with evolution, and COVID is brand new, however you believe it came about.

Imagining contagion "just happens" is a pleasant fiction to adopt. I get it. The alternative is seeing everyone as a potential harbinger of misery, expelling illness at you. But your life story has no plot armor shielding you from disability or an untimely demise. A single unmasked cough can reshape your entire future.

Don't you trust the vaccine?

Sure, when the circulating strains match the one targeted by the vaccine, I don't bother with masks. Sadly, we don't seem to get more than a few months with how rapidly it evolves.

I prefer natural immunity

Generations, including our own, skip over natural immunity for many diseases in favor of vaccines, from smallpox to measles, and attempts to retry exposure often go poorly. COVID is probably in the category of diseases to avoid, rather than catch hoping to gain more in immunity against yet another future infection than you lose in long-term effects.

But masks don't work

At a population level, there is a lot of uncertainty. But for individuals who properly use them, they do block viruses or we would not be able to send healthcare workers into rooms with measles or flu dozens of times a day and not suffer hospital-shuttering outbreaks. That we do not possess the technology to prevent virual spread at all is a fantastic claim. Ask the nurses you know how they're able to care for patients with flu or COVID without falling ill and whether they'd round to those rooms without PPE.

Would you wear a mask if it could provably block viral spread? If not, your belief that they do not work is motivated reasoning, an attempt to justify a desire (I don't want to wear a mask) with a factual claim (masks don't work).

I'm not going to live in fear

Life is about managing risk, not avoiding it. A mask is like a seatbelt. Go out, drive, live your life, but use available safety equipment to make it significantly less risky. No one would say they're living in fear of a car crash because they always put on a seatbelt.

You don't use it all the time?

Only in high traffic, enclosed airflow situations. Walking by hundreds of people in the mall or grocery store? Sure. Sitting at a coffee shop alone or spending time with a couple of people? Likely not. Wearing one for the short durations you're in very busy, poorly ventilated public places can cut down 90% of your exposure.

I wish to discuss further

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