It's just mindboggling to me how many otherwise intelligent people are ready and willing to put the blinders on to ignore logic just because it doesn't fit their agenda. Use the bare minimum of analytical thinking and the question usually answers itself.
Masks suck, this whole thing sucks. A lot of bad decisions had been made for a whole list of reasons, biggest being that this was all largely unknown and unstudied a year ago. We have all learned a lot since then, we'll have learned a lot more a year from now. Well, most of us anyway. Some people are too busy wearing their masks over their eyes and ears to acknowledge any of it.
Do masks always work for the wearer or those around them? No. Does 6 feet of distancing always work? No. Does limiting to15 minutes of exposure? No, of course not. You can catch it from a passerby, or you can spend hours face to face with an infected person and never catch it yourself. Nothing is a guarantee, but the statistical likelihood changes drastically based on certain actions. It's not a black and white thing here, this isn't a light switch. Use your heads or at least pretend to acknowledge how this all works. It's about risk management and risk mitigation. That statistical likelihood was studied and evaluated to determine which actions are most helpful in reducing spread, along with being sustainable and easy enough for most people to actually do them. People have analyzed and studied this extensively and it's driving at least most of the decisions. Not all, but most. There are some very simple things that are low risk and high reward. No, there's not a magical wall at 6 feet, but the rate of spread due to particle dispersion, gravity, and air flow significantly lowers the risk at that distance. 7 feet would be better, 50 even more, but 6 feet was studied to be good enough to significantly help without being a ridiculous and unsustainable target. No, a mask doesn't stop everything, but it traps a high enough percentage to significantly limit viral spread in either direction. So does keeping your head shoved firmly up your ass I imagine, so I guess some of you get a free pass on the mask thing. No, the virus doesn't activate after 15 minutes, but that's the window that experts have found before the amount of exposure becomes high enough to increase the likelihood of infection. 14 minutes would be safer, risk doesn't eliminate until 0, but we're back to that risk vs reward thing again. There's got to be a realistic target to shoot for. Yeah it's a virus and nobody is pretending we'll eliminate it entirely, or at least nobody smart and realistic, but there are some pretty simple things that can be done to minimize risk if enough people aren't too selfish and pigheaded to do them.
I'm not singling anybody out or responding to anyone in particular because I'm just talking society in general. This thread seems to be a pretty good assortment of the whole range. I'm obviously on the more cautious side compared to some, but still take a lot of unnecessary risks compared to the most cautious. I go to work intermittently, I go shopping, I pump gas, I go out to eat once in a while. I also wear a mask, I sanitize my hands more than I ever used to, I try and distance myself from people(never liked people much anyway....), I try not to touch commonly touched surfaces in public when reasonably possible. Really all the kind of stuff(besides mask) that I should have been doing all along, because if you ever stop and look around, people in general are freaking gross. At the end of the day I'm making my decisions based on the same risk vs reward as everyone else, but everyone's scale is tipped a little different. I'm willing to do the simple things asked of me to help get this to go away sooner. If more people felt the same way we'd be needing to do a whole lot less of those things. There's science to back it up, but that's inconvenient to peoples' agendas so we'll just ignore that. That's where my problems come in with it though, when selfishness, stubbornness, and irresponsibility affects everyone, not just the person doing it. It's a social responsibility thing at that point, not just personal responsibility.