A brief thread on face masks and illness, based on my credentials of running a bedbug site for 14+ years, and my diploma from the Twitter Institute of Public Health
So bedbugs 101: they live in and around bed furniture, are hard to eradicate because they are very flat and like to hide. They subsist entirely on you and me; they don't care about whether the bed is made, there is trash around, people are poor or rich, etc.
As anyone knows who has gotten them, bedbugs are really hard to eradicate. This became a severe problem for American hotels and urban apartment buildings in the early 2000's, as bedbugs (for reasons unimportant to the thread) staged a comeback, after a generation without them
What I quickly noticed on my bedbug reporting site, which let people post anonymous reports of encounters in hotels and buildings, was that everyone got racist as hell about them. They were always the fault of foreign travelers or foreigners who moved in next door
People want a sense of agency and control, and if they are in a situation where something bad can happen at random, they will find stories to believe that give them that control back. Very often the first thing to hang such stories on is ingroup/outgroup stuff.
I am sure this has been studied to death. I am only a bookmarking site (use Pinboard!). But it occurs to me that much the same thing goes on with diseases like herpes (VERY prevalent and hard to defend against) and of course now with the coronavirus. We make up moralizing stories
This is where the masks come in. Wearing one sends a signal (I am worried about this disease, and also trying to do my part to stop it). People want a socially visible signal they can send that communicates this! If the masks make things worse, we need to give them another one
You cannot just tell people to wash their hands a lot and call their doctor if they feel bad. Something will come in to fill that social gap, and to create the sense of control. We need to think of creative, medically neutral or helpful things people can DO to fill this need
Ideally these are signals that are prominent, socially visible, antiracist, and provide some measure of real protection against an epidemic. Doing the chicken dance instead of shaking hands, wearing a brass diving helmet. I don't know. Let's get creative about this
But just remember people are people, and a situation where a terrible thing can happen to you at random will always channel us into the worst behaviors—rumormongering, racism, ostracism, and panic. So give people constructive things to do, even if minimally helpful. Thank you!
We need soap that turns people's hands bright purple for two hours, but only after they use it properly. And burns your eyes if you touch them.
