What is astounding to a lot of us in South East Asia is the reluctance of the West in learning from our lessons. How many deaths and personal trauma experiences do people in general need to go through in order to learn from others?
In the US, it's more to do with the way the CDC's messaging throughout the pandemic than any rejection of the evidence concerning a mask's efficacy.
People refusing to wear masks rarely question whether or not it works, and more to do with a low estimation of the disease's threat, as well as contempt for both the technocrats who chose to mislead the public about masks early on, and leaders who they believe are overstepping their authority by mandating them.
Our leadership has been doing everything possible to burn through its perceived legitimacy, and this is the result. Childish, spiteful, somewhat understandable behavior.
I think the CDC mis-messaging is one component of this. Another is that there is no long tradition of public medical mask-wearing in the West, unlike many parts of SE Asia. Public mask-wearing is new, exceptional, and somewhat alarming if you live in North America or Europe.
Yet another component is that trust in the press and other public institutions was at possibly an all-time low in America at the time the COVID pandemic became public knowledge, and shows no signs of pulling out of that nosedive.
If you wore a mask in public in the UK before COVID, you would have got some very strange looks. They might have thought you were a criminal trying to hide your face. It seems fairly normal now though.
> "Hey, some government people lied to us saying we don't need masks, hence why we won't use masks now"
> Great logic there. But hey, cutting your nose to spite your face is nice, no?
Stupid people are gonna stupid, but you can't lie to people and then expect them to then automatically trust you when you're telling the truth. Those people are objectively and factually wrong, but they are right to be distrustful. If the issue wasn't one of science that we could otherwise objectively evaluate, their position would be perfectly rational and reasonable.
Wasn’t it more a result of tribalism? Even before the masks were really a topic it became quite important politically for the pandemic to be real or not, depending on which group you hoped benefitted politically or not. From the outside it looked like everything more or less flowed from that starting point, and then everyone picked their positions and favorite realities from there.
No. And I say that due to my experience here in Sweden, with the same message spread around about masks. I understand why the government did it in the beginning of the pandemic, to save PPE from shortages, to avoid people using masks and getting a false sense of security, etc.
Still, it created a lot of distrust when the message changed a few months ago, it wasn't a tribalist issue and I can completely understand how people ended up with this distrust. They are still wrong and I completely agree with this comment [1].
Interesting, thanks for sharing. How do you get to a high correlation between mask usage and political party in that scenario, though? If the underlying factor is truly inconsistency from the CDC rather than tribalism then (I think) you wouldn’t expect that.
As someone who worked the public for the entire pandemic, id say it was about 50-50 between people who thought covid wasnt a threat and people who thought masks werent effective
There is a strong culture of individuality, and that is coupled with an extreme reluctance to just do what we're told, and what I mean by that is more about trust than Authority. Trust is low here, which is problematic for a scenario like this.
Many of us did learn those lessons.
For me personally when this all began, checking out what the world is doing seemed the natural thing to do.
The US is also very insular, in that a smaller percentage of people travel abroad than is typical for many Western Nations. And a small percentage of people seek news produced outside the nation too.
Both of those stats are better elsewhere in the West, so make of that what you will.
I think it goes further than individuality, though. There's a pervasive selfishness that seems to run through our (American) culture. Many who do believe that COVID is a threat to others (say, to older people, or to immuno-compromised people) but do not believe that they themselves are in much danger will decide not to wear a mask because they don't think it matters to them if they do or not.
This is the thing that makes me saddest. It just seems like people in the US are unwilling to endure even a minor inconvenience if it will help someone else but not do anything for themselves.
The idea of some effort, cost, minor sacrifice or inconvenience for a common, public good is not strong here.
Couple that being basically as insular on a personal level as we generally are nationally, and we find more of us than we may expect are empathy challenged too.
It seems pretty selfish to force small businesses to close and not allow people to earn a living, for a disease that has a pretty high survival rate and is only really a problem for old or very unhealthy people. And it goes against all pandemic guidelines from before 2020, which was to shield the vulnerable and let everyone get on with life more or less.
Friends were talking about that a year ago. Health authorities in the west were completely ignoring their counterparts in Asia early on. Dismissed the threat until the pandemic blew up in Northern Italy and New York.
A lot of people in HN were arguing that the 0.7% fatality rate reported by Chinese authorities in Feb/20 was because Chinese medical care is bad.
If you watched reddit all the comments to all news from China (including doctors dying, doctors not dying, hospitals being built or filling up, doctors clapping on TikTok because they'd released their last patients) was complaining about it and calling it fake news from the CCP. They were happy about the same thing from the US though.
Do you remember the posts about people dropping dead in the streets, people skin turning black, or massive cement mixers "disinfecting" streets? There was plenty of fake news going around.
The people spraying disinfectant everywhere was a bit silly but also not any different from what we were doing. At the time people out here were keeping their mail outside for 3 days and sanitizing their groceries.
