@WhiteBus: to the best of my knowledge, I don’t know you personally nor you me. I only know one poster on this thread personally but have formed my own opinions on most of the regular posters and their inclinations/biases etc.
You puzzle me.
While you do occasionally come across as brusque and irritated or angry and insist that others spell out and do a lot of the work, you do often ask eminently reasonable questions. For example I understood – or so I think – your reason for insisting on knowing deaths versus cases in all of these new outbreak states. You, I believe, want to know if these additional cases are actually translating into deaths or if treatments have made COVID-19 much less dangerous, or if the virus has potentially mutated to a less virulent form, or whatever else. I think that is a fair question and well worth understanding. And I can tell you are frustrated by what you consider fear mongering.
Fine. But I remain truly puzzled by your attitude toward masks.
I am no expert on COVID and am learning or unlearning (!) something or the other about it every day. But when I know that COVID is an airborne contagion and I read stuff like how Hong Kong has a ridiculously low number of deaths and/or Seoul and Tokyo’s subways are full of people every day and they have kept their cases and deaths low, I am forced to believe that masks make a huge difference. I have visited Tokyo and Hong Kong and the population density on a day-to-day basis in terms of their commutes etc. often exceeds even NYC. And yet, their results not just in deaths but also more importantly in CASES are so much lower!
Could I ask you what else if not masks you think is different there to make CASES so low per capita when everything would suggest otherwise? It doesn’t actually matter WHY they are wearing masks as opposed to us, does it? Doesn’t the simple fact that they wear them and their case counts are so much lower mean something? If, say, you believe that wearing masks wasn’t the only thing that caused these stunningly different results – after all I can’t “prove” that it did – what else could be responsible for such a difference? Better tracing, better quarantining, what? And since no one can "prove" it is any of those things either, what is it about wearing masks that seems to so bug you?
What am I missing? I ask to understand and not to debate or fight about this.