OK, time to weigh in here. I'm in Korea so I have a different perspective than ya'll USA people. Been here a year. Mask use is essentially 100% here in South Korea, I see it daily. Maybe it's an Asian "rule-followers" thing, or it could be cultural in that they seriously hide emotional displays and wearing a mask so one cannot see the face facilitates that, I don't know. Bottom line, they seriously wear the Face Diaper. Like, all the time.
Guess what? South Korea is seeing a spike in 'Rona, like pretty much everywhere. What does that tell me? Masks? Yeah, right. Ineffective at preventing this disease in oneself and also others. I suspect that is not a 100% thing, it probably does cut down transmission to a degree. However, it ain't all that either.
But WTF? Shutting down business over it? That's freaking crazy. Let people make their own choices. You want a masked retail experience, well, chose a business that does that, otherwise STFU.
But! That is not what REALLY bothers me. The "snitch" thing has got to just freaking stop. If you want to "turn somebody in" you better expect that your complaint will be made public: no redactions. I hate to bring up late 1930's Germany, but this practice was one of the key enablers that led to the rise of, you guessed it, Nazi Germany and everything that came along with it. Do we, as a country, REALLY want to go there?
So, apparently a specific business makes honest reasonable attempts to comply with a questionably reasoned set of rules in response to faceless complaints, only to be determined without due process or recourse that the business was somehow "not in compliance". Which America DOES that? One would hope that the arbiters of the rules enforcement would have to not only "shut 'em down" but also be obligated to specify what criteria need be met to escape the shutdown order. In other words, some form of due process as opposed to an endless set of mandates that are murky and ill defined in their inception. Break a rule? Apply a remedy? Oh, too bad, we changed the rule. You are still closed, too bad, so sad.
Then there is the disease itself. Taking the average of all the noise, the infection rate is roughly comparable to an order of magnitude to the ordinary seasonal flu. There is a corresponding similar rate of serious adverse health effects, to include death. The deaths are sad, but it's the one thing that everyone eventually accomplishes, so far as I know. So, we're worried that more people than what is the norm will die? Apparently yes. Yet the truth is that a microscopically additional risk of death or serious illness is what is actually happening. Thus, it's isn't the dying that is in play here, sorry.
Hospital capacity and utilization, well, THERE is a measurable metric. What's the truth? America ramped up capacity on a wartime scale, hell there were MASH units in downtown Nebraska. They went largely unused from what I have read. Because you know, we flattened the curve. With masks.
Could we see a health care system overwhelmed? Sure, simply because it's built to handle a fairly well documented general illness rate and not a whole lot extra. The extra demand that was predicted but the so called experts simply failed to materialize, just did not happen. But, lets say it did just for the sake of discussion. Would our care givers manage to find a way to deal with it? Well you bet they would by a method used and extensively studied and modeled. It's called "triage". It's brutal: let the people that can't be saved die, work on the ones that have a shot at survival first, and kick the whiney babies with runny noses to the curb. It must suck to be a doctor that has to make decisions like that, but that is why they study stuff like that and are front line medical ethics practitioners. Pay them the big bucks, they deserve it.
The abuse of power by petty "Health Department" officials without establishing a clear avenue of review and redress, i.e., due process, must be stopped by any means necessary. They obtain their power from us by our explicit permission, they have no power in and of themselves. They like the rules we don't like? The ones in power in a representative democracy on occasion forget that we, as a function of governing ourselves, actually write the rules.
