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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
If x is safe and y is not, you never, any week, do y. But go ahead and do x all you like.
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That's exactly the wrong way to think about it. It's not a binary world, where things are categorically safe or unsafe. There is some risk to, say, eating at a restaurant, or going to the DMV, or having a kid go to school, or getting a haircut. The way to think about it is NOT: well, it's safe for my kid to go to school, so it must be safe to do all those things -- I'm going to do them all. It's more like, I going to get a haircut today, so I'm not going to compound the risk by eating out and going to the DMV. If you want to balance COVID risk and living your life, you have to think about what cumulative risk you're willing to take, not just apply a simple go/no-go heuristic for everything in your life. Too many people doing the latter.
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He's not distancing. Failure to distance is, to use the above analogy, a y behavior.
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Yes, rather. My point was that he wasn't being tribal or Trumpy. Your media diet may feature two opposing tribes all the time, but people are a little more complicated.
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And natural selection is and shall continue to deliver a verdict to them.
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That's a lovely sentiment, but it missed the point in a way that the media (for example, the local news here) is constantly missing the point. Those people are not only taking risk on themselves, they are endangering other people around them. If the only consequences were for themselves and their hypothetical offspring, it's easier to think in libertarian terms, but the issue here is that in a pandemic, sick people make other people sick.
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But I entirely disagree that most Americans or even more than 1/4 of Americans are refusing to wear masks. It's a slice of Trumpland engaging in that behavior. If Trump's base is 35% of voters, and we can thus extrapolate that it is 35% of America generally, I'd generously estimate 1/2 of Trump's base is anti-mask. (But 100% of those who'll show up at rallies.) That's 17.5% of society. The rest of us - even most rational Trump voters - are wearing masks.
I travel through heavy red areas and everyone is wearing masks, and most of these people are Trump voters.
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I drove through Utah and Arizona not too long ago. Didn't see anyone wearing masks in Utah. There were some in Arizona, but by far the exceptions rather than there rule.
