The COVID-19 pandemic

[danbrotherston]

the liars will hopefully be discouraged from trying if they know they will get pushback

See, but any one liar getting pushback means several non-liars are getting pushback and have to defend themselves. Those people may feel that going out will bring really shitty social situations. It's a poor tradeoff for something that doesn't even appear to be a significant issue in Ontario. Thus far, at least.

My guess (not educated) is that the population of liars will be low enough that there will be far more risk from people wearing masks and not social distancing than there will be from the entire population of those who don't wear masks, for whatever reason. Masks are only one piece to curtailing transmission, and not even the most important one (distance is!).

First of all, this isn't necessarily true, you're assuming that believing people are lying is targeted at random, and there are fewer liars than non-liars. I think both are unlikely.

I expect the majority of people who claim an exemption to be lying. My basis for this belief is from my experience that masks provide very little impediment to breathing, therefore, one must have an extremely serious breathing problem to be unable to wear a mask. And number who would lie about having a medical reason, while still rare, I suspect is less rare.

I expect beliefs about people faking to be relatively well targeted, largely because people who choose not to wear a mask for reasons other than medical limitations, are unlikely to be quiet about those other beliefs, more, unlike someone with a severe breathing problem, is also likely to be very unafraid of the virus.

To be fair, I'm making a lot of assumptions, but we will see.

But I do think that it doesn't really matter, we only need 80% (My intuition is that the number is actually higher, but the study I've seen quote says 80%) to have an effective policy, and I still have hope that the asshole population in the region is pretty low, say under 5%.