Open Covid post

[rachelmanija]

So I just went to a supermarket in LA, not even in Crestline, and the only people wearing masks were me, one checker, and one guy in a line, and the latter was wearing a surgical mask mostly off his nose. The ancient lady in line with me? No mask. Kids too young to get vaccinated? No masks. Literally everyone but us three? No masks.

AAARRRGGGGH WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL THAT YOU CAN'T WEAR A GODDAMN MASK FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC?! WHAT EXACT BENEFIT OF NOT WEARING A MASK FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES MAKES YOU SO HAPPY THAT YOU WILL RISK YOUR LIFE AND THE LIVES OF NON-CONSENTING OTHERS FOR IT? DO YOU WANT MONKEYPOX? THIS IS HOW YOU GET MONKEYPOX. AND ALSO COVID.

Comments on covid and other communicable diseases go here.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I was at my eye doctor's Wednesday and they sensibly still ask you to wear masks, and then a patient came in without a mask, and said something like, "you're still doing the mask thing?" and the receptionist confirmed that (also there was a sign, which he probably saw, though of course this being an eye doctor he might not have) but he still didn't put on a mask, but just continued with his business (sorting out some appointment). Unbelievable. And that guy wasn't young either, nor were the majority in the waiting area. At least everyone else was wearing FFP2s and wasn't an antisocial jerk.

[graydon]

One thing that made me happy when my optometrist sold the practice is that the new optometrist is young, energetic, decidedly blonde, and the sort of nice that wins ruthlessness contests with the devil. The "no appointment, no mask? we don't open the door" policy has become tighter.

I feel appropriately lucky about this!

(I need to find a new dentist; still no air filters.)

[graydon]

The social cost of taking precautions is higher than the emotional cost of taking risks.

Lots of people deliberately making that social cost high, and it's not costing them anything -- they're profiting from it -- so by fundamental primate logic it's obviously not the case that the precautions are important.

(Plus people do not want to believe there's a real problem; nobody has quite managed to get up and say in public that the status quo ante pestis is one with the Thebes the Golden. Most have failed to deal.)

[rachelmanija]

the status quo ante pestis is one with the Thebes the Golden

What does that mean?

[coffeeandink]

Yesterday morning my sister texted me that she was in a subway car with 11 people and only 5 of them were wearing masks.

[kathmandu]

In my part of the USA masking had fallen to roughly 1/4 around April.

As of a couple weeks ago it went up to more like 1/2; I'm guessing that's maybe from the more alert people hearing about BA.2 through BA.5. (We are in the Northeast and BA.2 was spreading in March, clearly heading for the rising wave which has started to be visible on the charts these last few weeks.)

But my supervisor at my current job quietly dropped commitments to put up better "the mask goes OVER your NOSE" signs, and dropped commitments to get air cleaners, and instead said blithely that Covid is over. ...I used to think she was smart.

[ellenmillion]

Shopping is exhausting and disappointing. I feel like masks got really STUPIDLY politicized and never recovered from that early indoctrination, because how is this a hard or illogical thing? I was relieved (and surprised!) that the summer camps I picked are maintaining masks indoors. School in the fall weighs heavy on my shoulders, but I am somewhat comforted to know that my daughter's best friend will also be masked, regardless of what else happens.

[lannamichaels]

Yeah, I'm extremely angry and very upset about all of this.

[rachelmanija]

I've avoided covid so far but getting it in this wave feels inevitable. I have school age kids in my pod, grocery stores don't deliver where I live, and I have unavoidable stuff I have to do indoors.

[cofax7]

I'm just about the only person still masking in my office (I'm there 2 days/week) despite the fact that we get regular announcements about covid cases in the building. One of my coworkers honestly didn't know that you could get covid multiple times!

The wastewater sampling program is, so far as I can tell, the best way to track covid in our area, but there are relatively few areas that are doing it...

Today's The Daily went deep into Long Covid: yes it is still a thing, people! 30% of the people who get it have no pre-existing conditions! You can still get it even if you barely noticed you had covid! There's no real treatment protocol for it!

Sigh. I'm sorry things are so bad there, but not surprised.

[graydon]

Not only can you get it multiple times, it gets worse with repetition!

[sartorias]

I KNOW> I had to go to the post office today, but I was thinking, at least they make everybody wear masks there. Nope. Not any more. The workers all wore masks, but the people I was in line with? Nobody except me.

[rachelmanija]

ARRRRGGGHHHH.

[sovay]

DO YOU WANT MONKEYPOX? THIS IS HOW YOU GET MONKEYPOX. AND ALSO COVID.

I had missed PT for about three weeks due to being too sick, but I was finally able to resume sessions this week and was horrified to discover that in the time I had been gone, I had become one of exactly two people in the entire building who could be bothered to wear a mask besides the staff, who are obliged to. It felt horrifically unsafe. I was sharing an elevator with a dude with no mask on and also a garbage bin and I didn't like the metaphor. My pulmonologist was talking to me about the new sub-variant this afternoon and surprise surprise, it's just as destructive as the parent strain of Omicron while spreading even faster with a threshold of exposure only marginally higher than "a passing stranger coughed" and an unprecedentedly opportunistic rate of reinfection. I don't understand if the wholesale rejection of any health and safety protocols whatsoever is fatalism, malevolence, or willful stupidity of stratospheric proportions—¿por qué no los tres?—but I am unexaggeratedly concerned it will kill me, never mind the people I care about. I have some very specific vulnerabilities to a disease of this kind. At least two years ago people were willing to pretend, if not believe, it was real.

[rachelmanija]

Oh no. My PT office is still requiring masks THANK GOD but it's literally the only place I've been in that is.

[graydon]

Pet rant:

Surgical mask real effectiveness numbers -- mean how often do people who say they wear them get COVID relative to those who don't mask -- is about 50%.

N95-or-similar real effectiveness is about 75%.

Elastomeric respirators with P100 cartridges aren't perfect -- you can still catch COVID via the mucous membranes of your eyes -- but they're at least a couple nines effective. Along with the more-effective they're long-term cheaper and more comfortable. (The industrial designers have had a long time to optimize them for long term wear.)

And for some reason, people just will not use them.

[kathmandu]

Care to recommend a style/model/source?

I might be willing to wear for errands and stuff, but this kind of purchase is a lot to spend without knowing for sure it will fit comfortably and correctly.

[anna_wing]

I'm in a Southeast Asian country but the Westerners here have abandoned masks totally. I was at a work event the other night, and I was literally the only person wearing a mask except for the waiters. It was meant to be an outdoor event, which would have been OK, I'm willing to take it off then, but the monsoon arrived early, so we were all jammed indoors.

They've even gone back to the handshake and kissy-kissy. Ugh. I compromise by offering an elbow if they ignore my polite namaste and persist in sticking a hand in my direction.

And I'm seeing daft questions on-line like, "Do I need to carry a mask when I'm travelling in Asia?"

!!! How heavy are a few KF94s? Or one or two three-layer cloth masks?


And now they'll be spreading monkeypox. Gah.

[lilacsigil]

I work in a pharmacy and once masks were no longer mandatory only three of us* continued to wear masks. I see people come in who are more immuno-compromised than I am and they don't wear masks. One woman whose husband has a kidney transplant laughed at me wearing a mask and said, "Oh, I've had three vaccines, what more can I do?"

*To be fair, several of the staff already had COVID last month (so that was fun) and all of them caught it from their children. So masking at work wouldn't have prevented that. But *everyone* masking would have.

[vass]

I voted in prepolling for the Australian federal election on Thursday. The volunteers handing out leaflets weren't masked. I was the only person in the queue who was masked. The electoral officers were masked. I saw one other voter inside the polling place wearing a mask. That same day I went to the pharmacy. There were unmasked staff there.

Yesterday I went to the vet. The staff weren't masked, only one other client was masked and it wasn't over her nose. I also went to the pet supply store (one masked staff member, one not) and a different pharmacy because the first one wasn't stocking N95s (they weren't all masked either, but they had N95 masks for sale.)

What are we DOING here?

[wpadmirer]

I have gone to the grocery so many times and been the only person wearing a mask. I don't care. I have still never contracted Covid. I'd say that gives me the upper hand.

[kathmandu]

I'm with you on that.

[mrissa]

I drove across Wisconsin earlier this week, coming home from the most COVID-safe writing retreat I could devise: I rented a cabin, I stayed there by myself for four days and another person joined me for four days. We brought in all our food to cook for ourselves except for ordering a no-contact-delivery pizza. The only buildings I went into were the rest stops across Wisconsin to pee on my way, because it is an eight hour drive and my vertigo meds are a super-diuretic.

The thing I noticed was not that mask-wearers were a minority--I expected that. It was that there was camaraderie among us. Little waves to each other, a friendly smile if you were taking off your mask coming back to your car and seeing someone else putting one on in theirs. That...did not fix the majority of people not masking. But it was nice.

[cyphomandra]

I just got back from my first overseas trip in 3 years (to Australia), which was made more tense by the fact that you currently need a negative RAT to enter NZ and 2 of my 3 friends who’ve been to Australia recently got stuck there with COVID for at least an extra week each. I therefore spent most of the time in a N95 noting just how many people weren’t wearing masks. Planes were fine (the airline I used has masks as compulsory, although they still serve food & drinks), and there were reasonable numbers of masks on public transport, but then it dropped off rapidly; some shops staff, a few passers by, only one other person in my two day 20 hour workshop. I was massively relieved to still be negative for the flight back.

(and I bought a ridiculous amount of manga from Kinokuniya. It’s been three years! And yet, still no more volumes of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service : ( )

[profiterole_reads]

I don't know why people think Covid has ended. Also, I would like for monkeypox not to spread like Covid did, but it's totally going to happen. *sighs*

[em_h]

These days I hardly ever go anywhere except my own church, where I can enforce masking at the door, but even there people seem to treat it like some sort of game. We had painters in yesterday -- not hired by us, but by a renter group who wanted to paint their office -- and every time I turned my back they would sneak their masks off.

Plus, we have been advised that we can't legally require masking at rental events, so I mostly just vacate the building during rentals, which isn't great community relations. In a couple of weeks we're going to be a polling station for the provincial election, on a day when I have to be in the kitchen cooking, and you KNOW that most of the voters and poll workers are not going to be masking. Hell, the nurses at our vaccine clinic don't mask very well, though at least they keep up the basic pretence.

A did a wedding at the college chapel this week which she felt probably reached the threshold for the right to refuse unsafe work, there were so many people in the space and not a mask in sight. She told them that diocesan policy still requires masks, and they were like, "BUT WE JUST HAD OUR MAKE-UP DONE!"

[vaznetti]

I can't really blame people here (in England) for not masking. The government advice has been clear and consistent -- unfortunately it has also been that masking is only a temporary measure and once the majority have been vaccinated everyone can forget about it! Their goal from the start has been herd immunity, and even though that seems like an impossibility given reinfection rates I guess the fact that this is all driven by politics rather than medical advice means they can keep going in the hope that someday enough people will have had covid, and it will just go away.

I don't know. At this point I mask on the bus, and in shops and other indoor spaces with people I don't know. But there are a lot of contexts where we seem to have just decided to give up, and since I now think that I will be wearing masks forever in the places I'm wearing masks now, I'm trying to find a balance.

[sovay]

Their goal from the start has been herd immunity, and even though that seems like an impossibility given reinfection rates I guess the fact that this is all driven by politics rather than medical advice means they can keep going in the hope that someday enough people will have had covid, and it will just go away.

The magical thinking is maddening.

[starlady]

Masking is down to about 75% in my grocery store--the staff are all still masked up. At this point I suspect this is how it's going to be for the foreseeable future. The school district reinstituted a mask mandate as of this Monday, so we'll see whether that affects behavior outside schools.

[fox]

I’m glad to say that here in my part of the DC area, mask usage continues to be about 70% by my unscientific estimate in the four (ugh) shops I had to go in today. (And 100% at my kid’s preschool, which is one of the reasons we’ve always liked the place.)

[bemused_writer]

I really feel this pain. No one around here is masking. My job is hosting a large, optional event, and I know no one will be masking there either, so I opted not to go even though I would have otherwise. The whole masking issue is very frustrating and I still can't believe how politicized it got.

[marjorie1170]

Mandatory masking has dropped in Ontario, except for public transit, clinics, and hospitals. Perhaps they'll drop that too! The stupid thing is the way they talk about masking, namely it is "strongly recommended". Well, so what? When it's not mandated, people stop using masks. As if this language makes any difference to the vast majority of people. (Yes, masking isn't perfect when it is mandated, but it is a heck of a lot better.)

The library is the most masky place I go to.

[ivy]

My new job, which was supposed to be all virtual, turns out to have a lot of in person meetings (roughly one day a week?) in the office, and no one wears masks there. So there's silent pressure not to, and that's not what I signed up for.

[branna]

I wear an N95 anytime I am in a building. I am so so tired of the nonsense, but most folks have very clearly given up on precautions at almost any level.