Society has functioned for thousands of years without banning exposed faces/mouths. Perhaps we can focus on balancing risk-reward vs some utilitarian-authoritarian ideal that completely neglects people's individual freedoms in exchange for an unrealistic and unreasonable pursuit of a statistically aesthetic(zero deaths) outcome? These kind of well intentioned platitudes like "if we can prevent one death, one single death then any and all measures are worth it without consideration of cost+freedom" wouldnt make sense if you were talking about, for example, banning all driving to prevent millions of deaths every year.
Society has functioned for thousands of years while accepting slavery. Society has functioned for thousands of years while banning freedom of religion. Society has functioned for thousands of years without antibiotics etc. Just because we've done things for thousands of years, it doesn't mean we can't improve.
Your driving argument actually reinforces the parent's point. In most places in the world, you can't drive beyond a speed limit and you can't drive while drunk. These are restrictions on people's individual freedoms.
"Society has functioned for thousands of years without banning exposed faces/mouths"
Yes, at the cost of tens if not hundreds of millions of deaths during the 1918 flu pandemic, for instance.
Do we really want to repeat that mistake so that some people can have the "freedom" of not wearing masks (and not social distancing either, because apparently many people think that infringes on their freedom too).
"Perhaps we can focus on balancing risk-reward vs some utilitarian-authoritarian ideal ... if we can prevent one death, one single death then any and all measures are worth it"
Authoritarian ideal? Any and all measures? Really?
Can we please get some perspective here?
We're not talking about some extreme measures like those truly authoritarian societies are infamous for, like making people slaves and working them to death, exterminating entire populations and political opponents, depriving minorities of all rights and property and then throwing them in to ghettoes, or completely (and I mean completely) making everyone subservient to their leaders.
Let's not trivialize the horrors of true authoritarianism by conflating them with people covering their faces to save thousands of lives.
