I was doing business in the outskirts of the sightseeing industry until the end of last year. The punctual flight and the promising quality of hotels were crucial. All of these ended in the beginning of the pandemic and I started it over from learning new things, such as coding and AI. It’s been a crazy year but also it was full of new findings and surprises. If I can go back to January or February and optimize the year, the first thing I would do is to completely ignore the deniers. Every minute and every single second that I spent trying to understand and interact with the Covid-19 deniers were just wasted time. They never put on a face mask and I get nothing from talking to them. I don’t cry for the old life lost but I regret wasting some parts of life on the deniers.
Another friend’s family got infected. They were also my neighbor in the town where I chose to live in the first year of my Romanian life. It’s near the border to Hungary and the population density is extremely low. The main street is only 50m long. You can hear someone breaking the firewood from 2km away. It’s that quiet. Everybody thought such a place would be the safest until the end. Now the hospital, 40 minutes away from where I was living, has turned into a Covid-19 medical center. That friend’s family was another denier. They never wore a face mask and didn’t care about anything. They are treated at home now but the husband is staying with perfusion and almost dying. A random denier, who was also infected by Covid-19, said it’s probably the flu. This is how their world goes.
According to some people, imposing a face mask is against the basic human rights. I was quite disappointed to hear this claim from some libertarians because I thought I was one of them (To be precise, my view was closer to anarcho capitalism but I don’t think the government must be abolished.). If the rule to make us wear a face mask harms our human rights, probably they don’t fasten the seatbelt or wear a helmet. If you reject fastening the seat belt, the airline company is eligible to leave the passenger on the ground. A face mask is nothing different. It is a typical paranoia to think the government starts controlling our lives from making us wear a face mask. Actually wearing a face mask manipulates the facial recognition system and it deteriorates the surveillance capability of the government. There is a huge logical leap between a face mask and 1984. Whether it’s a government or a hospital or a postman who says we should wear a face mask, wearing a face mask is logical in the current situation. Economically speaking, when someone robs a petrol station for 1,000 EUR, the 1,000 EUR is transferred to the robbery. The transferred 1,000 EUR will be spent , saved or invested so the money doesn’t lose its value. However when a freedom fighter doesn’t wear a mask even though he was infected without symptoms and deprives someone of its health, the stolen health won’t be transferred to this freedom warrior. This anti masker doesn’t become double healthy, but another healthy person is lost from society. Besides, the scarce medical resource would have to be spent on this new patient. “My face my right” doesn’t work when the medical resource is shared. It works only when this person has his own private doctors and hospital exclusively sponsored by him otherwise it’s merely a freeride.
This is not an ethical matter. The necessity of wearing a face mask is a logical consequence. Pfizer and Moderna are said to make 13 billion $ from their vaccines. A face mask costs only 0.5 $ with no severe side effects.
However unfortunately as I said above, we cannot change others. Staying home and keeping the distance from the deniers would be the only way to protect ourselves.
