Masks — the Flag of Covid Combatants
By: Lance Montauk
Tags: Masks, Flu 1968, Propaganda, Covid

Another email — discussing Covid masks outdoors

Hello XXXXX,

I much appreciate your thoughtful epidemiologist’s response.

All google-search mask cartoons I could find are pro-mask, convey the idea that mask opponents are uneducated deplorables, Republicans, etc. in the most one-sided propaganda assault I have ever witnessed.

Much of my career (doctoring and lawyering) I’ve noticed professionals focusing on narrow aspects of their trade, ignoring usually unconscious motivations, all the while overlooking either specific or broad impacts of their activities.

GENERALLY HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONERS CANNOT BE TRUSTED

I believe most studies support the idea that health care providers over-estimate the positive effects of their (proposed) interventions, and under-estimate the negatives. I’ve certainly witnessed that non-stop, and I believe many reasons underpin this phenomenon. Lawmaker, methinks, do the same. Many reasons for this kind of behavior have been well-described, and include financial, cultural, social, professional, legal, psychological, emotional, political, etc. The universal law of unintended consequences (many foreseeable) explains only a small portion of the discrepancies between advertised and real outcomes.

WHERE IS THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EQUATION?

Doctors thus in general, and the ID/epidemiologists now, have mostly failed to weigh the costs of their proposed interventions, and — indeed — your reply focuses only on hypothetical benefits: wearing masks can prevent disease so we should wear masks; smoking in public causes disease so it should be banned. So far largely absent from discussion, especially in the healthcare sphere, are the countervailing factors. Only recently have numbers begun to appear about the collateral damage. If wearing masks for a year prevents one death out of a million, is it worth it? If not hugging children the next year would prevent 10 deaths in a million, is it worth it? If not attending school for a year will prevent 100 deaths in a million, is it worth it?

ARE THERE TWO SIDES ON THIS ISSUE OR IS ONLY ONE SIDE RIGHT?

When the civilian collateral damage exceeds uniformed casualties (common in wars this last century) we express moral disapproval and/or evoke the concept of ‘total war’. I think the collateral damage from infectious disease/epidemiologic efforts to suppress or control Covid already match the impact of the disease and will, in the end, vastly outweigh it, so I can morally disapprove of the efforts. The first studies are out with estimated numbers of collateral deaths due to delayed/non-delivered medical care from Covid phobia in the USA — they don’t approach the direct Covid deaths yet — but neither are they an order of magnitude less. And they don’t include the direct deaths and disease from abuse, suicide, alcoholism, increased homicides, accelerated rates of dementia, failure to immunize, etc., and we will never be able to measure the loss to our children from diminished social contact, lost educational opportunities, etc., not to mention the unemployment, malnutrition, and total dislocation of the entire world’s economy, certainly most likely to devastate the most economically disadvantaged around the globe in the next years. For me, the mask-in-public is the flag of combatants on one side of this conflict.

EXAMPLE OF NEWS ARTICLE TOUTING NUMBER OF LIVES MASKS SAVE

A while back there were some guesstimates regarding the actual benefit of mask-wearing, under the blazing headlines of “how many lives could be saved” so I tried to extend out the numbers. My computation was that if about 3,250–7,500 Americans wore masks 90% of the time, for 6 months non-stop, one less person would die of Covid. Put another way, perhaps 325–750 would need masks to prevent 1 hospitalization. (Most of that benefit, of course, would come from mask-wearing indoors — stores, shopping centers, etc. since we probably agree that outdoor transmission probably is quite low and perhaps approaches zero). I don’t think there’s any place in America where, if you asked folks to step forward, 3,250–7,500 would volunteer to wear masks to save the older or mostly infirm one of them at greater risk — and yet that’s the number required to underpin the policy.

ABOVE FROM CDC: 1968 FLU EPIDEMIC AS DEADLY PER CAPITA AS 2019/20 COVID

LAWS AND MASKS

As for the legal stuff, that’s a somewhat different analysis. It’s quite different to ask for someone to refrain from a particular activity (smoking a cigarette) and ordering everyone to engage in a particular activity. The law has different ways of analyzing affirmative requirements vs. proscriptive ones, but they are not considered identical. Having said that, we all break laws all the time — who comes to a complete halt at every stop sign? I consider the mask proscriptions, “shutdowns”, etc., to be the single greatest authoritarian imposition on civil liberties during my lifetime in this country, all for a virus which — so far — seems no less threatening than the 1968 flu, which no one my age (we all survived it) can even remember as an event. Instead we remember the riots and RFK assassination. And as for law-breaking back then, I took an affirmative action, based on a moral perspective, going into a draft center to protest the Selective Service, and in 1968 went to federal prison as a result thereof. Way back then I concluded it is not “illegal” to commit a crime — in fact, the law assumes citizens will break the law and thus specifies the applicable penalty. You break the law, take the risk, pay the price, all according to the law and society’s structure.

Finally, regarding politeness, when we met I believe I asked you guys if you wanted me to wear a mask (I brought one in case)- and you were non-committal. In general, when practical I ask folks for their preference, but that has nothing to do with disease or epidemiology — it’s out of respect to them. However, that’s not practical when walking in public, biking, etc. That being said it’s cute hiking in the hills to see people don their masks or make a symbolic gesture to do so when one walks past them — a new learned social tic that will probably take longer to eradicate than it did to inculcate.

I have great respect for you and your family and hence felt it worthwhile to flesh out my thoughts somewhat more.

Lance