Okay I'm sincerely confused about all this mask stuff. I was a surgical assistant for eight years and wore a mask for ten to fourteen hours a day, six days a week. My O2 SATs were always 98%+, even as a smoker. I would frequently check my O2 SATs when turning over anaesthesia equipment. Mind you, I would frequently be exerting myself in orthopaedic procedures, so it was by no means sedentary.
Sure, wearing a dirty cloth mask may present other health risks, but the common recommendation is daily washing, which would prevent many of those risks. There's definitely a small minority of the population that may experience complications due to underlying health conditions (such as asthma or COPD), and this may be a valid reason to object to some of the mandates, but wearing a mask for fifteen minutes while you're in Wal Mart will not kill you.
I agree that it shouldn't be something the government mandates, but is this really a hill worth dying on? I pull my shirt over my nose when people ask me to wear a mask out of respect for their business, why be a dick about their abundance of caution?
I would check myself after surgeries, and at varying points in the day. There was no affect to my, or any of my colleagues O2 SATs. Why have I never heard about this when masks are a ubiquity in the medical field in the first place? It honestly was never a part of any military or civilian training I was a part of.
Do you understand why masks are worn in the medical field? It's not to prevent the medical workers from getting sick, it's to prevent the patient from being contaminated with things from the medical workers, large particulates from the airway being a major one.
So the mask mandate isn't to prevent the wearer from being sick, it's to reduce the main transmission vector as much as possible: large particulates from the airway. So you're not saying "I accept the risk", you're increasing the likelihood of spread. Because at any moment, none of us can be certain whether the person not wearing a mask is spreading it.
You might say "but I know I don't have it, so why should I have to wear the mask?" And there comes the question of respect.
I may have a weird position here, but I honestly do not see the issue with requiring the use of a household item to cover your face in close quarters with strangers. It can reduce spread by up to 70%, and doesn't force an unnecessary burden on the vast majority of individuals (neither economic nor personal), banning the sale of items is a totally different story, but requiring the use of personal protective equipment because otherwise people would probably avoid the inconvenience? Yeah, I can get on board with that.
I just figure, out of all the things going on right now, why are we choosing to make masks the hill to die on?