The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #168430   Message #4113683
Posted By: Steve Shaw
18-Jul-21 - 05:47 AM
Thread Name: BS: Brexit & other UK political topics
Subject: RE: BS: Brexit & other UK political topics
The hole in your argument is the point I keep on coming back to. Right, you don't know which one out of the hundred may be infected. But, unlike your lottery tickets, which give you verifiable odds of winning, most (yes, really) of the hundred mask wearers will be illicitly reusing masks, touching the front at extremely frequent intervals, scratching their nose through it, taking it off to sneeze or blow their nose, putting it up in shops and down again on the chin when they return outside, shoving it in their pocket next to their snot rags and loose change, etc. Ninety-nine out of a hundred will not have coronavirus, but a good proportion of them will still be creating an insanitary and hazardous item. And all that we've been told about masks will makes lots of people complacent in a way that will affect their behaviour. And the one infected person is just as likely to be showing this bad mask behaviour, if not not more so (there's a good chance that they didn't feel well before going out but decided to shove that under the carpet, just the kind of inconsiderate person who would think nothing of indulging in bad mask behaviour). Fixed-odds lottery tickets are stubbornly inanimate and unchanging objects. A human being wearing a mask is just that, a human being.

I won't be going on crowded buses or trains. I'm going to do my shopping at quiet times. No pubs or theatres for me. I don't trust everyone to do the right thing, which involves staying at home if you don't feel well. But one fine day, when this is all done and dusted, we will be told that wearing masks was almost certainly doing more harm than good. Hindsight will prove to be a wonderful thing. We don't do this for flu, which can kill tens of thousands in a bad winter (we had one such just a few years ago), and we don't do it for colds, or even stop people with colds going into old people's homes. Rationality has flown out of the window in my opinion.