I actually witnessed this exchange three days ago, as part of my four-day Alexandria, VA hospital adventure:
Woman: Put on a mask! This is a hospital!
Man: Why should I? You’re not wearing one!
Woman: I am!
Man: You’re wearing it under your nose!
Woman: I’m still wearing it! Put one on, or I’m reporting you!
Man. Go ahead!
Whereupon the woman turned to the elderly volunteer manning the desk at the entrance. He wasn’t wearing a mask.
Are the idiotic pandemic masks the official symbol and attire of The Great Stupid? I think so. My experience at the INOVA hospital convinced me. At the Emergency Room entrance. a large sign mandated masks. A security guard ordered me to put one on (but not my wife, who was being checked in). The masks being handed out were those cheap paper things that are either completely useless or mostly useless, depending on who you talk to. During the four days of hospital visits, I didn’t see a single N95 mask on the faces of staff, patients or visitors.
Around the busy ER waiting area, there were unmasked people, masked people, and people wearing masks under their noses or chins. When my wife was being checked in, nobody appeared to care about the masks at all. The nurse processing us wore no mask. I didn’t; my wife didn’t. The attendants who took her to the temporary room did. Later on, all of the nurses and techs were masked, but some doctors were not. Nobody ever asked me or my wife to put one on. In the nearby rooms, the typical scene was an unmasked patient and a mixed crowd of masked and unmasked family members, shoulder to shoulder.
Later, when my wife was moved to a regular hospital room, the signs even disappeared. The Patients Entrance and Visitors entrance had cheap masks available, but there were no apparent requirements. Sometimes the receptionists were masked, sometimes not. Sometimes one was and the other wasn’t. I walked in maskless (let’s see…) eight times, and nobody said a word.
What’s going on here?
Madness, as Major Clipton said. Virtue signaling. Confusion. Mixed messages. Chaos. Fear. Stupidity.
Science!
Ethics Alarms 
Yup you pretty much summed it up.
Best thing is people who wear them outside, then in a restaurant til food comes then they take them off.
Fear robs us of common sense.
My dr told me they did absolutely nothing to protect anyone and most likely was why COVID spread as people were walking around sick thinking they were protecting everyone.
He has to wear them or he will not be allowed to practice.
He and others also said we’re going to see a lot of lung cancers in the coming years.
They do work for germs in the Droplets should one sneeze, but not in air.
Stupidity sold as science by the propagandists.
I like those wearing masks while driving – especially when they are the only person in the car. Oh, and those who wear them while walking around outside.
jvb
My sister wore them while driving because she’d forget to take them off.
Otherwise, I don’t understand masking while driving or walking outside makes no sense to me at all.
Jack,
An 18-inch bruise is massive. Your body is diverting all kinds of resources to healing, so you should feel worn out. It’s okay.
Still hoping for an answer to Michael West’s inquiry into the comedic quality of the event…
I think the Biden administration is in zugzwang. Nothing is panning out for them. The economic news continues to be bad. OPEC openly snubbed Biden. That the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not as much as a boondoggle for Biden is mostly due to the ineptitude of the Russian army. But let’s not forget that the Russians have a history of throwing bodies into the meat grinder until the meat grinder finally clogs up. So that’s still an ongoing problem, and the nuclear threat is not making anyone comfortable. The ripple effect of the war is destroying the green agenda as the fraility (and farce) of renewable power has become abundantly clear once all that foreign oil stops flowing. The J6 committee meetings have swayed no one. But the Right is getting more and more riled by the actions of the FBI, which increasingly is viewed as partisan. There’s been a surge of skepticism about Biden’s mental acuity that has come almost entirely from Democrats. And to make matters worse, DeSantis didn’t screw up his response to Hurricane Ian. It is likely the Republicans will take the House, and the Senate is a nail-biter. The Biden Administration has few options remaining to keep their agenda moving forward, and most likely their calculations say that extending the pandemic emergency sucks less than letting it expire, but neither option is good.
Of course, if it looks like the Senate is going to swing right, martial law may not be far off. Since Biden has declared much of the Right — and among them, a number of congressional candidates — enemy of the people, it should logically follow that if the nation is in danger of the Right taking control, martial law must be declared to protect the nation from such an awful outcome. We’ve been boiling a frog here. Each of these tiny steps the Left has taken has only marginally raised outrage, and mostly from its political enemies. Without sufficient outcry, they’ve been able to take the next incremental step, and the next. Biden’s Reichstag speech maybe took too large of a step, but only time will tell. Given the entire country has not erupted in outrage against him probably means the Biden Administration has the possibility of pulling the martial law card without igniting the civil war. But that’s only a possibility, and they probably wouldn’t want to declare martial law unless they truly had to.
I’m still expecting the FBI to start rounding up Republican congressional candidates in the next couple of weeks. But we’ll see.
(Attempt to post #7)
And in my shenanigans in trying to get this posted, I posted on part II instead of part I… aiyaiyai.
Jack, to expound on my bruise-anemia-life-threatening thing, your blood isn’t making it’s typical journey around the bruise. The discoloration is a good indicator that there’s expired blood leaking and being absorbed into your standard circulation. That’ll make you feel crappy.
Your body is tasked with making fresh blood at an accelerated pace, and that’ll make you feel fatigued.
As much as possible, keep the bruise above your heart to help with swelling and pain. Eat animal protein and drink plenty of water or Pedialyte AdvancedCare Plus, and give yourself a break.
I had a bruise that put me in the ICU, but I was anemic. I required five units of blood to stabilize me. I was informed that I was the most anemic patient they had ever treated that didn’t die.
Get some rest.
Sheesh. My doctor’s office still requires masks and will give you a paper mask to go over the cloth mask you are wearing. At least, they are consistent, though.
My sister continues to wear a mask — a cloth mask, if memory serves — whenever she goes into a store or visits someone. I do not.
I had my annual checkup last month, and the internal medicine practice my doctor is a part of requires you to wear a mask. In that case, I wear my cloth ‘Stros’ mask that a friend gave me. On the other hand, I see another doctor once a year and they do not have any mask requirements — at least they did not in November, 2021 and, if I recall correctly, in November, 2020 either.
Generally speaking, there is no mask requirement in this area, although there were a handful of NC school districts that still required them as of May, 2022. I still see the occasional walker or jogger masked up out in the open by themself — even my sister doesn’t see much benefit in that.
There was one store this past summer, that we visited. My sister went inside to shop, I went inside after a bit to get out of the sun. I was greeted by a salesclerk who informed me that masks were required in their store. I informed her that “I guess you don’t want my business’, and went back outside.
I keep an eye out in the grocery stores I visit and there’s probably at least a third of the shoppers who are still masked. I really wonder about people.
I’m going to take the token contrary position, because that’s who I am.
Wearing a mask, specifically at a hospital, is probably not a bad idea.
This isn’t even a Covid thing… Hell, this isn’t even a past four years thing… There are all kinds of germs in hospitals, and hospitals are where people with compromised immune systems tend to congregate. It’s unfortunate that hospitals tend to path-of-least-resistance their policies and cheap out on the shittiest paper masks made by 3M, But it’s probably legitimately better than the alternative of nothing.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a lot of people practicing hygiene they never had before in their lives: They washed their hands after handling money, they used hand sanitizer, they sneezed into elbows. These were all good behaviors and ideas in 2018, but they became front of mind after Covid, and I’m afraid we’re allowing politics to color our behaviors and that’s driving us to criticize obviously good behavior out of a perception of politicality. Even if the politics exists, reality does assert itself.
This is Retards For Freedom lite: Not quite as stupid as forgoing the vaccine to own the libs, but approaching it.