Idle Doodle: Inverse risk analysis in masking

California has not had a mask mandate for a few weeks now. The county I work in followed suit and removed mask mandates. Similarly, the office building lifted its mask requirements, though its enforcement had always been very loose.

A funny thing happened in our office. All of the older folks stopped wearing masks, though one of them hadn't stepped foot in the office until very recently because his elderly dad was staying with him until just recently. Totally understandable.

However, all of the younger folks, save one, still wear their masks.

Let's even ignore the low mask efficacy since nobody seems to know the real-world studies concerning them. Neck gaiters do worse than not wearing anything. Cloth masks do nothing. Surgical masks have an 11% efficacy in the highest recorded reduction of transmissions in real-world studies, from a study out of Bangladesh of rigorous masking situations, suggesting the average efficacy is far lower than 11%. N95 masks do have a high efficacy since their designed purpose was to eliminate airborne viral transmission, but the real-world efficacy is likely less than what the CDC cited-but-not-cited research previously claimed. It also took the CDC until 2022 to admit that N95 masks actually work better than other masks.

Let's just assume it's reasonable that nobody knows this is what studies show, even though they've been readily available for a long time now, but for the record, only one of them wears an N95 mask.

Everybody for sure knows that COVID-19 affects the older population far greater than the younger generation, and it's not even close. Everybody also should know that Omicron is far less deadly than prior variants.

One would think that people with very low risk would be less inclined to engage in more prohibitive behavior and that people with higher risk would be more inclined to engage in more prohibitive behavior. But the opposite happened.

This would be like people within five years of retirement putting their money into the S&P500 while the younger folks put all their money into certificates of deposit. And people into their retirement putting everything they have into meme stocks.

And I have no idea why.

Are the younger folks just able to tolerate masks more? Are they unable to do proper risk analyses? Has it just become the trendy thing to do? Do they teach critical thinking even less than they did when I was in school? Do they all take care of an elderly grandparent on a daily basis? Is it peer pressure? Are they more susceptible to propaganda?

I don't know how well this extrapolates into other situations. The vast majority of people in Costco and Whole Foods, for example, still wear masks in the areas I'm in. I didn't notice any stark differences between age groups there. My son's preschool still does require masking, but the state of California still mandates mask-wearing in preschools. I have never been confident in the state to do any risk analysis, whatsoever. I don't have much confidence that this preschool will be able to do much (if at all) better, but at least they don't have the power to force their foibles on others.

[edit 3/16/2022] Shortly after publishing, a coworker told me that he had the same experience in observing younger people in a retail mall in Concord and a young Libertarian Party member talked about his high school relieving mask wearing and he was the only one no longer wearing a mask.