Also: PPE is a triage procedure, ie it's done to make a shitty situation slightly better when there are no other options available.
With schools, with workplaces, with anywhere that's not immediately medically necessary, there is a very obvious alternative available to forcing people to wear masks: cancel the events entirely, make it so people don't gather in close proximity, pay whatever needs to be paid to make that happen.
"yes masks are really inconvenient and uncomfortable, that's why the government should be paying every single person to stay at home so they won't need to wear a mask!"
Read & memorize the last paragraph. This is how you fight a culture war: you don't take the position they set up for you, you use the kernel of truth they're weaponizing, & weaponize it against them. It's political Jiu Jitsu - you redirect your opponent's momentum against them.
Or, put simply by paraphrasing a great man: "you don't fight fire with fire, you fight fire with water: you don't fight [capitalist individualism] with [capitalist individualism], you fight it with [socialist solidarity]"
Expanding on the ‘ppe is a triage procedure’ point
Ive taken a few occupational health and safety courses, and in my province there is a mandatory Worker Health and Safety module from our Ministry of Labour that needs to be completed by every worker. One of the things that these teach is hazard reduction in the workplace and, surprise, a lot of the concepts are easily applied to hazard reduction literally anywhere.
Hazard reduction comes in multiple flavours: elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative, and PPE.
As we see on this useful graphic: these various methods of controlling hazards have different levels of effectiveness. Setting aside elimination and substitution as they can’t apply to the current topic, the most effective control is engineering, which is applying whatever infrastructure changes are necessary to keep people away from the hazard. This is the ‘government pays everyone to stay at home’ method. Following that is administrative controls, which I figure mandatory social distancing falls under, though only if its actually enforced. The least effective method of controlling a hazard is personal protective equipment.
Let’s do a quick metaphor: say you work in a factory which has recently been filled with bees. The bees came in the factory on their own and there are so many of them that working is almost impossible. Removing the bees will take a long time, but there are people working on that. In the meantime, your boss told you that you need to go back to work, and that you should wear a mask because there are bees. This situation ends with the factory getting sued for failure to ensure a safe workplace, and losing.
If the government refuses to do their due diligence in regards to the health and safety of their citizens, there should be consequences scaled large enough to ensure that it never happens again.