> condemning everyone as sick with zero evidence isn't how a free society works.
That is like saying that seatbelts and speed limits condemn you as a bad driver.
A free society protects everyone's rights. What people tend to forget is that every right has a price, in the form of an obligation. For example: You have the right to private property, and the price is that you must respect other's private property.
One of the things that is difficult to get about Covid is that you can simultaneously be infectious (able to transmit it to others) and asymptomatic (no headhache, no fever, not even sore throat). That is not something we are used to deal with, our other infectious illnesses aren't that stealthy. There are other things that are atypical about this virus (the kind of vaccine we used is new, the amount of infected is unusually high, it transmits via air...). Treating this illness with the knowledge and techniques that we have learned from other illnesses is simply not enough, there are too many differences.
The free society is protecting your rights. In particular, your right to not be infected by another person might have no other chance but to get into close contact with. The price of that right is that both of you wear a mask.
Even if the mask is terribly uncomfortable for you, you must endure it because other people also have rights. The same way that just because you are hot, you are not allowed to take off all your clothes in front of everyone.
> being strangled
You might just need a better mask.
My head is big compared to the heads in China. Most of the masks I have access to locally for cheap are made there. They tend to be quite uncomfortable for me.
I splurged ~60 bucks into buying several from different makers and found a model that works for me (Adidas Made For Sport, I wear it at the gym and do cardio with it. Comfortable and makes you look like Bane). When I'm going to use the public transport or visit a hospital I wear an FP2 mask with an ear protector. It is not comfortable, but at least my ears don't hurt a the end.
You are confusing _right_ with _constitutional right_. The US constitution also doesn't say anything about seatbelts, speed limits, or privacy when browsing the internet. Other US laws have rules that encode and protect those non-constitutional rights.
Besides, this is a worldwide problem. Looking at it from a US-only perspective is insufficient. Other countries have other legal systems and encode rights in a different way (some of them don't even have a written "Constitution").
> The virus will be around forever and everyone will be exposed.
That link that you sent is just an opinion from a single person written on a website. "Vinay Phrasad, hematologist-oncologist and associate professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco".
Let me try to share my thought process when I see something like this.
I have no medical training, so in principle that person is more knowledgeable than myself. On top of that, he teaches at the SF University. Those are very good credentials. How could I possibly ignore what this person says?
- I know modern medicine is highly specialized - When I go to the family doctor and he detects a problem on one ear, they might send me to an otologist, for example.
- There is a branch of medicine for infectious diseases: epidemiology. This person is an "hematologist-oncologist". That is already a bit of a warning sign. If I really wanted to dig, I would google his name, look for publications/studies. Maybe his practicing title is hematologist but he also has done the epidemiology training, he just doesn't practice that on a hospital. Let's assume he does, because I don't feel like doing that work right now.
- He's a single person. Individual people have every day problems. Get ill. Discuss with their spouses. Are sleep-deprived because they have to take care of a dependent person. And a myriad other things. I have to consider the possibility that Dr Vinay just had a bad day when he wrote that. The usual way to counter this is by looking for opinions of "groups of people". Peer-reviewed journals, etc. It does not seem like "medpagetoday" has a strong peer-review policy. This is published as an "opinion piece". That is another red sign.
- This is not a regular epidemic, it has reached pandemic levels. The number of people specializing in those must be very limited, because we don't have pandemics frequently enough to sustain large numbers of professionals. It also requires some budget - to gather information, travel to places, run labs to do analysis, etc.
So I would ask myself _which groups of medical professionals which specialize on pandemic illnesses and have a budget exist_. I know of two: The CDC, and the World Health Organization.
I would then compare what you are saying and what Dr Vinay is saying versus what those organizations are saying.
And for now, both the CDC and the WHO say that everyone should be wearing masks (they just differ in the age at which they should start).
> You can't seriously expect people to spend the rest of their lives wearing masks.
I try not to "expect things in long term", nowadays. Every day I try to get the evidence, and then re-evaluate with what I learn. Sometimes I wish that I could have a predefined idea of how the world works and then be able to ignore any piece of evidence that contradicts that, like I see some people are doing. Constant uncertainty is draining!
My expectation for _today_ is that everyone keeps wearing masks. So is my expectation for next month. I _hope_ that the CDC and WHO know what they are doing, and I think they are our best bets. I will follow their indications the best I can, but I can only _hope_ that the rest of the world does the same.
Actually there's no valid scientific or medical reason for most people to keep wearing masks. I recommend listening to infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi who explains it very clearly.
Dr. Monica Gandhi is an outlier. Outlier voices are important. Unique perspectives are valuable (her's coming from experience with HIV) but while listening to the views of an outlier can be comforting to cling to when they are telling you what you want to hear, it's important to look at what most experts are saying and to consider the evidence that cause them all to agree. A statement like "there's no valid scientific or medical reason for most people to keep wearing masks." is simply false. We have a massive amount of evidence that masks are effective. Once we have overwhelming evidence that something else works better to slow the spread of covid in our communities and protect ourselves and each other from infection I'll be thrilled to ditch the masks, but so far we don't.
That is like saying that seatbelts and speed limits condemn you as a bad driver.
A free society protects everyone's rights. What people tend to forget is that every right has a price, in the form of an obligation. For example: You have the right to private property, and the price is that you must respect other's private property.
One of the things that is difficult to get about Covid is that you can simultaneously be infectious (able to transmit it to others) and asymptomatic (no headhache, no fever, not even sore throat). That is not something we are used to deal with, our other infectious illnesses aren't that stealthy. There are other things that are atypical about this virus (the kind of vaccine we used is new, the amount of infected is unusually high, it transmits via air...). Treating this illness with the knowledge and techniques that we have learned from other illnesses is simply not enough, there are too many differences.
The free society is protecting your rights. In particular, your right to not be infected by another person might have no other chance but to get into close contact with. The price of that right is that both of you wear a mask.
Even if the mask is terribly uncomfortable for you, you must endure it because other people also have rights. The same way that just because you are hot, you are not allowed to take off all your clothes in front of everyone.
> being strangled
You might just need a better mask.
My head is big compared to the heads in China. Most of the masks I have access to locally for cheap are made there. They tend to be quite uncomfortable for me.
I splurged ~60 bucks into buying several from different makers and found a model that works for me (Adidas Made For Sport, I wear it at the gym and do cardio with it. Comfortable and makes you look like Bane). When I'm going to use the public transport or visit a hospital I wear an FP2 mask with an ear protector. It is not comfortable, but at least my ears don't hurt a the end.
You could also try inventing a better mask.