Properly understood, they're on opposite sides of the equation and as mentioned, I'd prefer not to do any punishment at all, because I feel like that cuts off most of the nonsense. So that means giving people masks if they don't have one or making reasonable accommodations where possible and making interventions about safety.
But I know it's not quite so easy and especially now a lot of people are hardened and less willing to work together to smooth things over.
> But I know it's not quite so easy and especially now a lot of people are hardened and less willing to work together to smooth things over.
The whole point of enforcing public health and safety rules is that a significant percentage of the population is uninformed/misinformed and shows poor decision-making skills based on their personal risk perception and how they value the impact of their own actions on everyone else's risk.
If it only takes one ignorant fool to spread a deadly disease to dozens around him, how do you expect to mitigate or contain a pandemic?
That's the point, you can't. That's why I believe that softer interventions like this would've reduced the number of people who turned hard against this as they wouldn't have nonsense to point at like that guy who got arrested for being alone on the beach or whatnot.
The resistance is proportional to the force used and the polarization of the populace. I'm trying to reduce those factors. Look at all the non-polarized states and you see that people aren't trying to manipulate each other into doing what they want, they're trying to help each other.
This isn't typhoid Mary, you can't just quarantine one person. I hope that we can patch the vaccine escape from Delta with boosters, but even that is unclear.
"Prefer" is pretty woolly, what happens when push comes to shove? "Well thank you for offering me that mask, but masks simply don't work" [hands you a copy of the DANMASK19 paper]. Do you punish the person why defies you or not?
Yes, it's not easy. In general I prefer interventions like avoiding them, offering them an alternate way to shop (online/someone will gather a list of the items they want/etc.), or similar measures. I doubt there's any perfect answer.
I do feel if things had been like "here's a mask" from the start, though, that there wouldn't be nearly as many people refusing them.
But I know it's not quite so easy and especially now a lot of people are hardened and less willing to work together to smooth things over.