@daas-yochid Why do you not want to encourage people to wear masks? They work, which we all know now, so why are you so against them?
The reason mask wearing is important for COVID is that COVID isn’t just “some flu”. It’s far more contagious than pretty much any other common virus out there. So even if the “hospitilization rate” is the same as the common flu (it’s not, COVID has a far higher hospitalization rate), the infection rate still makes it much more dangerous. What that means is that where a flu can affect 100 people, COVID-19 will affect 10,000. Meaning that in a theoretical closed population you are much more likely to see people hospitalized and dead from COVID than other common viruses. Which is why mask wearing is important as it lowers the infection rate. B’chasdei Hashem we will see more and more vaccinations as the days go on and im yirtzah Hashem that will mean that we will see lower and lower rates of both infection and hospitalization, making the virus much less dangerous so we no longer have to mask and socially distant.