While I’m not against this policy (I’m Chinese American and already sometimes wore surgical masks when sick), I expect your experience of the past year has given you a falsely inflated sense of the efficacy of masks. Yes, they definitely help prevent you from contracting airborne diseases, but a large part of the reduction in infectious disease transmission risk this year was due to the full battery of COVID restrictions, rather than just your own mask use. Like, flu rates were very low[1] because people were very isolated from one another, and so in any given crowded place, you’d be much less likely to encounter anyone who had the flu at all (plus of course, anyone infected would likely be wearing a mask). As things go more back to normal I’d be surprised if just wearing a mask allowed you to avoid getting sick all year, every year. But I guess it depends on the mask and how reliably you wear it?
[1] Flu deaths in the US dropped from ~30,000 in the two previous seasons, to 600 in the most recent season! (source)
I agree that last year was an uncharacteristic sample of day-to-day cold/flu prevention from masks due to the lower prevalence of other peoples’ droplets. I failed to mention that my opinion of mask efficacy is also influenced by having spent a lot of time traveling, and observing a correlation between wearing a cloth mask on planes and getting sick after flying less frequently/severely. If good masking under normal germ-laden droplet loads once those return causes me to experience comparable cold and flu levels to what I had without masks, I’ll need to revise my opinions, but I think even halving cold and flu frequency, duration, or severity from their prior levels would be worth the hassle.
I consider cold and flu prevention to be as much an accidental side effect of diligent mask use as it is a direct benefit. Side effects of using a mask in the way that I consider “correct” include never touching my mouth or nose after touching shared surfaces, and only eating in settings where I only touch clean/non-shared surfaces between cleaning my hands and touching my food. For instance, without respiratory droplet precautions, I might order a plate of tacos at a sit-down restaurant, get up and wash my hands at the restaurant’s bathroom, touch the grimy back of my chair as I sit back down, and then put my hands (now featuring the germs of everyone else who’s touched that chair today) straight onto my food. With respiratory droplet precautions, I’d order my tacos to go, take them to a park, wash my hands or use hand sanitizer, and then put my clean hands onto my food to eat it. I think the little details like that which happen to result from droplet precautions probably make just as much difference as the mask itself.
While I’m not against this policy (I’m Chinese American and already sometimes wore surgical masks when sick), I expect your experience of the past year has given you a falsely inflated sense of the efficacy of masks. Yes, they definitely help prevent you from contracting airborne diseases, but a large part of the reduction in infectious disease transmission risk this year was due to the full battery of COVID restrictions, rather than just your own mask use. Like, flu rates were very low[1] because people were very isolated from one another, and so in any given crowded place, you’d be much less likely to encounter anyone who had the flu at all (plus of course, anyone infected would likely be wearing a mask). As things go more back to normal I’d be surprised if just wearing a mask allowed you to avoid getting sick all year, every year. But I guess it depends on the mask and how reliably you wear it?
[1] Flu deaths in the US dropped from ~30,000 in the two previous seasons, to 600 in the most recent season! (source)
I agree that last year was an uncharacteristic sample of day-to-day cold/flu prevention from masks due to the lower prevalence of other peoples’ droplets. I failed to mention that my opinion of mask efficacy is also influenced by having spent a lot of time traveling, and observing a correlation between wearing a cloth mask on planes and getting sick after flying less frequently/severely. If good masking under normal germ-laden droplet loads once those return causes me to experience comparable cold and flu levels to what I had without masks, I’ll need to revise my opinions, but I think even halving cold and flu frequency, duration, or severity from their prior levels would be worth the hassle.
I consider cold and flu prevention to be as much an accidental side effect of diligent mask use as it is a direct benefit. Side effects of using a mask in the way that I consider “correct” include never touching my mouth or nose after touching shared surfaces, and only eating in settings where I only touch clean/non-shared surfaces between cleaning my hands and touching my food. For instance, without respiratory droplet precautions, I might order a plate of tacos at a sit-down restaurant, get up and wash my hands at the restaurant’s bathroom, touch the grimy back of my chair as I sit back down, and then put my hands (now featuring the germs of everyone else who’s touched that chair today) straight onto my food. With respiratory droplet precautions, I’d order my tacos to go, take them to a park, wash my hands or use hand sanitizer, and then put my clean hands onto my food to eat it. I think the little details like that which happen to result from droplet precautions probably make just as much difference as the mask itself.