There are two persuasions of people, with two different basic fundamental value systems, and these fundamental value systems guide how you see the world, shape all of your beliefs and positions, and almost perfectly correlate with and predict which of the two major political parties your beliefs will be most aligned with.
There are those that believe that when rights and desires come into conflict, almost without exception the rights of people should always supersede and take precedence over the desires of people, even in cases when it is the right of one or a few against the desires of many. They do not feel it is ever acceptable to screw one guy to help the next. Rights reign supreme.
Then there are those people that feel that their desires should always supersede and take precedence over even the “rights” of others. While they almost never have the self awareness to realize it, in essence they essentially believe that there is no such thing as rights, because as soon as someone’s rights conflict with their desires they no longer see those rights as being a right, hence there really is no such things as absolute or inalienable or inherent rights in their minds when it comes down to it. The only "rights" they will ever recognize and honor are the ones that do not conflict with their current desires. They make judgments about who they would like to give help or benefit to and in what ways, and then those desires are always going to reign supreme and have importance above all else including anybody else’s rights. They find it both necessary and perfectly acceptable to screw one guy in order to help the next guy or themselves. Their desires are what always reigns supreme.
I can only speak from the perspective of the former (so those from the latter persuasion are likely to see things differently), the persuasion I happen to belong to, because it is the only perspective that is moral and logical and I cannot find any way to justify having positions or a value system that is not both moral and logical. Anyway, rights always win out over desires no matter how strong or justified you feel your desire is, so that generally makes things fairly easy to sort out (as long as you are careful not to falsely see desires as “rights” which is very tough trap not to fall into for many people because of bias born out of natural desire to act in self interest, aka selfishness).
Where things get complicated is when the actual rights of various people are in conflict and there is no way to fully enforce all of their rights at once. Fortunately it is actually pretty rare that this happens. When it does a good rule of thumb is that a person’s rights end at that point where they would start to infringe on somebody else’s rights. Even that can have exceptions though, and those are the cases where you have to make judgment calls about which rights are more important than other rights, how many people are affected in what ways depending on which rights get violated how much etc, and in these cases often a compromise of sorts where everybody’s rights get violated a bit is the best solution.
So the question with this whole covid and mask thing is, who has what rights, and which things are just people’s desires as opposed to actual rights even if they are really strong or desperate desires? If there are no conflicting rights to be found in the issue then it makes forming the correct positions much easier because all rights will always supersede all desires regardless of what the desires are. If there are conflicting rights though, then judgments and probably compromises that everybody will be unhappy with will have to be made (and that everybody is equally unhappy with it is one of the best ways to know that a compromise or deal is a good and fair one).
People generally have the right to do whatever the hell they want as long as it doesn’t interfere with somebody else’s rights. You know, that whole life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness thing. People have an inherent right to choose whether or not they want to wear a mask. On the flip side, I also think people have a right to not have their lives put into potential danger by the actions of others. Kind of like how we don’t allow drunk driving to use an example given by someone else earlier, and pretty much everybody agrees not allowing drunk driving is a reasonable thing and you never hear a “if you don’t want to risk a drunk driver harming you then stay home but I have a right to drive drunk” argument. And both of those things seem like actual rights to me as opposed to desires.
So now we have one of those rare cases where actual rights and not just desires are in conflict. So the next logical argument, following in the “your rights end where mine begin” vein is, “well your right to choose not to wear a mask ends as soon as you are around others because now you are infringing on my right to not have my life put in the way of potential harm against my wishes”. But a valid argument back is that masks aren’t even proven to be very effective, or have a largely unknown effectiveness at best. Maybe if masks where incredibly effective they would have a good argument, but if masks aren’t even all the effective then that argument carries little weight. Problem is we really don’t know if they help a little or a ton or somewhere in between, and do you really have a right to violate somebody else’s right to choose whether or not they wear a mask, in pursuit of your right not to be put in the way of undue potential harm, if you don’t really know for sure how much it is helping or if it were only helping a little?
I don’t have all the answers here but what seems reasonably clear to me is a couple of things. First, those that are very strongly on either side of the issue are conveniently ignoring the rights of others based on their own biases and self interest and selfishness. Second, it seems likely to me that a compromise that neither side is going to be happy with is probably the most fair and just solution as is often the case when you get into conflicting rights. The question is just what that compromise should look like, but we are never going to be able to get there until we can all at least start acknowledging and valuing the rights of “the other side” because both sides do indeed seem to have valid rights that are being jeopardized and that are deserving of respect.
Maybe the compromise would look something like this. Masks required in “involuntary” and highest risk places, and not required in “voluntary” places or lowest risk places. Involuntary places would be things like the DMV, your work, the grocery store, pharmacy, etc, places you don’t have much choice but to have to go, and high risk being places like nursing homes etc. And voluntary places would be pool halls, bars, restaurants, social gatherings, the pool supplies store, etc, basically any place you would go to more out of desire than necessity, and low risk being schools, anything outdoors, etc. Everybody from both sides would hate it which means it is probably a good compromise, yet it would also actually have some focused common sense effectiveness as opposed to being just for show as a large number of current policies are. Pretty hard for the “I have a right not to wear a mask” crowd to complain about not being able to put people at risk in places those people have no choice but to have to go, and pretty hard for the “I have a right not to have my health jeopardized by non-mask wearers” crowd to complain about getting covid in voluntary places like the bar that they don't have to go to and are voluntarily accepting the risk if they do.