Bring on the Masks and Gloves!

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Scott Alexander looks into the question of whether a surgical mask can help keep you from getting infected by others. Short answer: very few reliable studies, but the answer seems to be “yes.”

But he says that this is reliable:

As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points. They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others.

Well, that’s it then! What’s the purpose of social distancing? To keep sick people from infecting others. But it seems like you could accomplish the same thing by having everyone where a mask. That would settle the issue of “asymptomatic spreading.” Nobody could be a spreader. In that case, masks are an alternative to killing the economy.

The government could do this:

1. Have the taxpayers pay manufacturers to produce a zillion surgical masks. Maybe gloves also.
2. Dispense the masks, paid for by taxpayers.
3. Tell people they can mingle in public, but only if they wear masks–otherwise they are subject to fines. Maybe encourage the use of gloves, also.

It seems like a policy that is at least worth trying in some locations, to see if it works.

A story in Time Magazine Asia says,

Nearly everyone on Hong Kong’s streets, trains and buses has been wearing a mask for weeks—since news emerged of mysterious viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China

. . .Yet, in the U.S., wearing a face mask when healthy has become discouraged to the point of becoming socially unacceptable. The U.S. government, in line with World Health Organization recommendations, says only those who are sick, or their caregivers, should wear masks.

Are the official experts at WHO and in the U.S. idiots? Or am I the idiot? I am curious to know.

39 thoughts on “Bring on the Masks and Gloves!”

  1. Should be pointed out it’s actually illegal to wear masks in public in some states which is one barrier.

    Other than that, you know liberty. But yeah I get it, we should cheerlead fabricated emergencies by the government to suspend human rights via writ because that’s state capacity libertarianism lol.

    And you know that as well when fines are mentioned, i.e. at that point it’s non-emergency as fines don’t immediately stop the unsafe behavior. Maybe we should just arbitrarily shoot anybody without a mask, that seems kosher now by libertarians.

    • The alternative is to not let people leave their homes. Surely this is more restrictive to personal freedom than having people wear masks…

  2. A few issues.

    1. Most people do not wear the mask correctly. I am still amazed at how many times people have their nose ouside the mask.

    2. If people touch their face and then touch something else, the disease spreads.

    3. No one is 100% effective at doing it. That is why so many healthcare workers are getting infected. Does anyone really think that people will wear masks at the gym or at family gatherings.

    • > many healthcare workers are getting infected

      An alternative hypothesis given the high general rate of non-pandemic hospital aquired infections and medical malpractice plus the large amount of obese chain smoking high on their own supply drunk doctors and their apathetic staffs whom one can observe in every medical facility unless they are intentionally wearing blinders too, it could be they are getting infected via their own poor behavior and refusal to follow protocol because of ego and not because of PPE failure. But yeah easier to blame equipment failure, that’s a time honored excuse.

    • Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If everyone was covering their face with even mere bandanas or pieces of fabric (which would be washable and reusable to boot), even if it was only 10% effective at reducing spreading, that’s still probably enough to flip the cost-benefit analysis on the whole shutting-down-the-economy thing.

      • How does a mask prevent spread at a dinner party, at a bar, at a restaurant, at the gym. A mask would probably cause faster spread because it would make them do more and spread more.

        The best places for masks would be supermarkets, big box stores, and pharmacies for their employees.

        • Obviously for the duration of the pandemic people wear masks all the time at all occasions and events. What’s so hard to understand about that?

          I lived in Japan for a while and it was the norm for people with any cold symptoms to wear the masks whenever outside their homes, to include during meetings.

          One was also supposed to avoid doing things or going places that by their nature would require one to take the mask off repeatedly, for instance, eating out at a restaurant. But, for instance, you could still go get a haircut, which you can’t in Virginia right now, because all barbershops are shut down by state order.

          Also, it’s not either or. You could combine strict mask-wearing rules with slightly less strict social-isolation rules. Or you could layer them on top of whatever social isolation rules one thinks optimal. Right now I see very strict social isolation policies, but the people who are going out and about for whatever reasons, essential or otherwise, are by and large not wearing anything over their faces. It would help a lot if they all did.

          • Do you think we could get people to wear masks most of the time.

            Asians and obedient rule followers with a well developed sense of cleanliness and hygiene. They have lived through these types of outbreaks before and have a very strong cultural norm of mask wearing even in ordinary flu season.

            The few times I venture out because I need to I don’t get the impression westerners would follow mask guidelines (if they could get any).

          • “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” It works, so just add masks.

            I used to live close to a popular public beach, which is about the most difficult place one can try to enforce that rule, because obviously lots of people have no shirt on – didn’t even bring a shirt with them – and many don’t even have flip flops. A lot of folks just want to come into the restaurant or store and grab a drink or ice cream. Hard to turn them and the money burning a whole in their pockets away!

            But the local proprietors did, repeatedly, despite typical American “Oh, come on man! It’s the beach! Give me a break, just this once?” begging and pleading, even flirting.

            And they did this because if they got caught, the health department would shut them down for the summer, which is about as devastating to a business as … well … exactly what we’re living through. And the health department made sure to hang an admiral to encourage the others at least once, usually early in the season.

            So you are going to have a lot of proprietors eager to help you enforce this rule all over the place.

            Another example is my gym. I mean, before it was ordered to shut down. They had the typical check-in personnel forbid people from entry unless they got a glob of sanitizer on their hands, and encouraged people to do the same on their way out too.

            Especially if you just hand them a disposable mask (maybe branded and fashionable!), most people – even Americans! – are just going to go along with it.

          • “Asians and obedient rule followers with a well developed sense of cleanliness and hygiene.”

            Uh, no. Asians have a horrifying sense of cleanliness and hygiene. Haven’t you been paying attention?

    • It doesn’t have to be 100 percent effective to be better than what we are doing now

      • If they are only 50% effective but people start crowding together, then is there really any advantage? How effective do they have to be to justify opening everything back up.

        The best use of masks would be to keep vital businesses open such as pharmacies, groceries, and the food production and distribution system. The last use of mask would be to open up restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues.

  4. This is fine, and your logic makes perfect sense. But after this is over I hope we never get to be like Asia where it’s the norm to wear facemasks. Just dehumanizes everything.

    • The actual note from CDC only says that they found bits of viral RNA after 17 days. It is silent as to whether they found viable virions. The more focused study from a week ago says that the half-life of SARS-CoV-2 is less than 8 hours on most surfaces. Taking 8 hours as a conservative bound, 17 days means the (viable) virus concentration drops to 2^-51 the original value, roughly one left out of every two quadrillion virions at the start.

    • ‘Can live’ is not particularly relevant. Humans can live to be 120, yet we don’t structure social security under the assumption they will.

      If you touch a doorknob 17days – or even 1 day – after an infected person touched it, your odds of contracting it are probably a fraction of the odds if you touch it right after they did.

  6. Wearing masks as a prophylactic measure makes sense; the strongest arguments against it are that it can be used to hide the identity of criminals, and that if it is not widely adopted, then (a) it may trigger ostracism of people who are cautious (rather than sick but going outside anyway), and (b) it may instill fear among others. None of those are compelling to me, and the latter two seem less persuasive than the first.

    Wearing gloves seems much less helpful. The virus neither leaves nor enters the body through the skin on one’s hands; hands are just a contaminated medium that can transport the virus. Removing gloves often enough, carefully enough, will limit the spread of the virus, but gloves kept on too long are just a different contaminated medium. Most people do not have that much discipline, much less the inclination to carry around a sanitized box of fresh gloves. I would leave the gloves to facilities like clinics and hospitals, where there is a supply of fresh gloves and the use case is conducive to only using a given set of gloves for a brief time. Hand sanitizer and hand washing are better solutions for most of us.

  7. A woman I work with who ordinarily manages the reimbursement department at a large teaching hospital tells me that she’s been drafted to help manage their dwindling supply of PPE equipment. I think the qausi-conspiracists out there saying that masks really do help and we’re being told otherwise to protect hospitals and front-line healthcare workers from a run by the public on these masks is at least partially correct.

    • Wear a mask, keep you hands away from you face, disinfect wile doing the weekly cleaning, frequent testing, avoid mass congregations like stadiums, transit, schools. Add in home triage for treating flu like symptoms.

      Easy for an organization, hard for homeless camps in LA who will all almost certainly get the virus. It becomes two tiered society, this is bad news.

      • Covid-19 has been described as a disease of the jet set. How else do ten NBA players become infected out of the first 20,000 and why Aspen has been harder than Omaha.

    • Didn’t they basically admit as much when, right after saying “don’t buy masks, they don’t help,” they then said, “because we need them to protect healthcare workers?”

      This doesn’t seem the least bit conspiratorial; the CDC clearly was trying to be Straussian and it may have backfired.

  8. Kling is citing WHO as experts. That strikes me as naive and credulous

    Read what Michael Brendan Dougherty says about the WHO:

    peaking of those authorities, this crisis has revealed how China has suborned and corrupted the World Health Organization, which, for political reasons, ignored credible warnings about the new coronavirus from doctors in Taiwan and instead credulously repeated statistics from authorities in Beijing, the ones downplaying the extent of the crisis. The World Health Organization delayed calling the virus a health emergency and then criticized U.S. travel restrictions placed on China, without reference to public-health reasoning, only to vague ideology. The WHO was trying to save China its embarrassment. And still, China wouldn’t cooperate transparently with the WHO.

  9. The CDC says that the main purpose of the masks is to prevent sick people from infecting others. Not sure if that’s true, or if they just wanted to discourage mark hoarding. But even if that is true, we’ve been told to assume we are sick so to justify social distancing to limit the spread of the virus. So it seems like wearing masks could be justified as limiting the spread from people who don’t know they’re infected yet.

    It would be great if masks were a viable alternative to distancing.

  10. According to this writer, the CDC is misleading the public in order to make masks more available to health care workers. As she says, “The message became counterproductive and may have encouraged even more hoarding because it seemed as though authorities were shaping the message around managing the scarcity rather than confronting the reality of the situation.”

  11. Hi, I’m not an economist, but I can act like one.

    First, assume you have a mask. The rest is easy!

  12. In addition to supplying workers with masks and gloves, businesses could:
    – Add disinfecting devices to air conditioning systems
    – Hire additional janitorial personnel to disinfect bathroom and shared kitchen areas every hour
    – Reorganize work to enable people to distance themselves from each other as much as possible
    – Hire personnel to provide in-plant testing

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