Mask: To wear or not to wear — that is the question. There are lots of decision-making techniques. Some are based on statistics, science, logic, math or religion. One simple technique was publicized by a French mathematician named Laplace. If you die believing in God, you probably go to heaven. If you die without believing in God you probably go someplace unpleasant for eternity. Since it costs nothing to believe, why not believe and be safe.
There is a small cost to wearing a mask, but the price of ownership has come down to less than the price of a hamburger. There are some small costs to wearing one. Speech can be muffled — so speak up — and it can be a bit warm; nothing you can’t adapt to. None of this can really be considered a hardship. Medical providers, fighter pilots and some factory workers often wear a mask uninterrupted for many hours, every day. What is the downside of not wearing one? Best case, nothing. Worst case, you get infected and die slowly and painfully. Alternately, you just get sick on a scale that ranges from never-knew-it to slow painful but not quite dead with possible lifetime impairment that we still don’t know much about. Another possibility, you contract COVID-19 and become a super spreader who may or may not have symptoms, but infects from one to a 1,000 others, each of whom can infect from one to a 1,000 others. Each of them in turn can infect another 1,000 that’s a billion people. Of that billion a five million could die. Another 100 million or so will suffer a range of symptoms comparable to the worst sickness they ever encountered.
We are all praying for a vaccine, or a miracle. Miracles are rare, so rare that hardly anyone has ever seen one; that’s why we have a special name for them. Vaccines take time to develop. The fastest so far was measles and that took six years. Suppose no one had ever thought of a cake and you decided to be the first except you don’t know even what it is. What would it look like? How big would it be? What would it cost? What would you make it from? What equipment would you need? How would you assemble it? Would it be edible? What if it made you sick? Who would volunteer to be the first to taste it, you? A vaccine is not that simple. To develop it means examining an infinite number of organic molecules some of which are as complex as a microchip, but are almost too small to be examined.
The vaccine also has to be tested to see if it’s safe. Then if safe, it has to be tested to see if it actually works. Then it has to be tracked to see if the effects last, fade or develop into something unpredictable. When that’s done, you have to make at least 100 million doses for just the U.S., maybe 600 million. Maybe seven billion for the rest of the world and right now, not over the next generation.
Something that has never been done before and you probably have to do it over and over. If you want to wipe it out you have to vaccinate everyone, every single person and that has only been done once, smallpox. It took 250 years. I just learned that the technique was practiced in Africa and was introduced to 18th century America by a slave named Onesimus. Jenner just improved it. (National Geographic) A worldwide effort to eliminate polio has been going on since the 1950s and we have been “almost there” for 10 years. (Rotary)
If you think you can get by mask-less until the vaccinations are available you a deluding yourself like my ex father-in-law. He did not wear a seatbelt because his next car would probably have an air bag. Not wearing a face covering in public is incredibly selfish: you could be the one to start the next geometric expansion to infect millions without ever having had a symptom yourself. WWJD.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com