I can say right up front that I’m not getting over this one.
I am a bit less hostile if the mask-wearer is elderly, as I can imagine that they might be seriously immuno-compromised. But when I see a family with young children and they are all masked, I can only think “child abuse” and “morons.” Indeed, I am tempted to ask them what the hell they think they are doing.
Today, in Northern Virginia, I still see teens walking alone outside wearing masks. I still see clerks at my CVS wearing masks, often working side-by-side with maskless co-workers. Most of the masks I’m seeing now are not the medical-grade masks that might have some small value in preventing infection: they are primarily plain old cloth masks or paper masks, as in “useless.”
The mask-wearers are, I am certain, almost 100% woke, virtue-signaling knee-jerk progressives who would happily elect Kamala Harris as President if given the chance. Wearing the things is a political statement as much as anything else. I perceive the masked as gullible to government propaganda and media scare-mongering for political advantage. I view them as fearful, lazy and apathetic individuals who have completely rejected core American character traits, like risk-taking, autonomy and independence.
Perhaps most important of all, I view the wearing of masks now as a deliberate signal that the individual does not want to interact with me, the community or society. I can’t read their expressions; when they talk, it is muffled and I have trouble hearing them. For me, they might as well be wearing paper bags over their heads.
I believe the masked among us are eroding the vital inter-relationships, human contact and communication that makes society enjoyable and productive.
No, I’m not getting over this bias.
I’m not even sure it is a bias.
Ethics Alarms 
Yep, you said it well.
I have come to believe that teens wearing masks do so not for health reasons but to obscure their identity.
Unthinkable how quickly the U.S. citizenry became like the sheepish Japanese and Chinese.
I also agree. Nearly everyone I see wearing masks is sporting the completely-ineffective paper or cloth masks, and that includes the elderly. I want to ask them what they hope to achieve by sporting a “protective” device that offers no protection. Particularly with the elderly, do those paper masks offer legitimate safety from anything?
It’s probably mean-spirited, but I pretty much ignore them, reasoning that maybe some shunning and shaming will affect some change. But as you wrote, maybe the separation is what they seek.
My daughter’s GI doctor wears those paper masks when we see her. It drives me bonkers. I have to ask her to say things three times to have a chance of understanding through the mask mumble. If she uses a medical term or a doctor’s name more difficult than Smith, I’m lost. Last appointment she kept telling me to have my daughter see a specific doctor for a second opinion. I suck at remembering names on a good day, but I walked out of there wanting to see a pediatrician named Al, not a neurologist with a long foreign last name starting with Al…. At least she wears it correctly over half the time.
I know a sweet lady who always wears a useless mask who really doesn’t need to who just got the WuFlu again and she said, “thank goodness I was wearing my mask last time we got together or I’d have gotten you sick.” That mask doesn’t stop much more than her breath, I’ve had WuFlu recently, and I really don’t care if I get it again. My kids are sick with the next virus of the day and we don’t get tested. If there are significant symptoms, we stay home. If not, we live life.
I struggle with the still masked, unless they wear real masks, and wear them correctly, since I don’t know if they have been FIT tested, I assume so for my sanity. Why did poorly worn PPE (if you don’t wear it 100% correctly 100% of the time it is no safer than not wearing it – OSHA) become the norm even for people trained in proper PPE procedure?
Our family doctor, who we both really like, still wears the paper masks. She took over her dad’s practice when he retired a couple years back and I’ve yet to see her face. I’ve given her a pass on the mask to this point, but if she’s wearing one next visit, I think I’m going to ask her about it.
I’m really tired of all the theater.
I went to my regular six month follow-up appointment today (regional hospital/primary care consortium), and most of the staff, including my doc, weren’t masked. I think I only saw one who was.
A year ago, they were still handing out masks if you didn’t show up with one. At that appointment, I told him I didn’t care it he wore one, and he gladly pulled it off…at least for my visit.
The Japanese started masking when Americans urged them to in the 1918 flu epidemic. Masking was pretty new back then. It was cutting edge, supposed to save lives. Big public health campaign in Japan by the American Red Cross. The Japanese have continued to mask during flu season for over 100 years.
I find it interesting that as a nation, the US doesn’t ‘believe’ in masks, and as a nation, the Japanese do.
I agree with your points Jack.
People don’t need masks in open spaces
Children don’t need masks
If you need a mask, cloth isn’t going to help, and only some paper are (triple-layer tight fit) will
You don’t need a mask alone in your car
However, I don’t understand the anger and hostility towards mask wearing. Would you be less angry if they were real N-95 masks? Or do masks in general make you angry?
We were in flu season when COVID was announced, and people doubled down here, and instead of the usual 70% or so masked, we reached near universal masking pretty much instantly, under people’s own discretion. We had no official mask mandates, just recommendations. At the beginning of the pandemic, kids schooled at home for a month and then went back, albeit masked indoors. Restaurant and bar hours were cut back, and caution was advised for large indoor gatherings, and cities decided on their own to cancel events that drew huge crowds (like the Kobe Christmas lights, 3.5 million visitors in an 8-day span) but we had no lockdowns of entire cities, or any major restrictions on daily life. The flu disappeared that year. There were 93% fewer cases of the flu that year. Viral competition surely played a role, but I can’t think that it was only that.
Japan had Covid cases on a per-prefecture rate of 500-1000 a day when US states were reporting thousands a day. My prefecture has the same population as MA, and the Covid rates were wildly different. Japan didn’t have its first enormous wave until 2021, when the restaurants and bars opened up full-time again and the government loosened mask recommendations. Differences in overall health play a role, surely. There’s a far lower obesity rate here, and drug use is nearly non-existent. The homeless rate is different. However, I can’t help but think that masking helped somewhat.
Medical professionals continue to mask on the job. (i)They(/i) think they work…masks, at the very least, stop spray from sneezes, and people’s breath from entering your mouth and nasal passages. You need to change a wet, compromised mask, but few non-medical people do. Wearing a contaminated mask is almost worse than none. I personally think that as the medical profession continues to mask to reduce their exposure rate to a variety of pathogens (with seeming effectiveness) that there’s nothing crazy about properly masking in high-risk conditions in public.A CVS employee comes in contact with hundreds of people a day, why not mask (properly)? I wear a mask shopping in December in flu season as the stores are horribly crowded, but that’s the only place I wear one now.
I believe that the pandemic broke a lot of things that were brittle and waiting for the next application of pressure to shatter. We’ve already seen a massive degradation of social interaction. It has been decaying much faster in the internet age, and social media has helped with the silos and echo-chambers. The full progressive offensive against Trump, though, pulled out most of the underpinnings that were left. When the pandemic struck, it was amazing and appalling how the narratives became a partisan divide. We’d already been primed to believe that the other side of the political aisle was evil, and now it could be placed in concrete terms. If you don’t mask up, you hate other people and are willing to let them die for your own convenience. (That’s still a step of short of actively killing someone else for your own convenience, but never mind that.) The moral superiority of the left was abundantly clear after that, dontcha know? You mask because you care, because you are doing your part to save mankind. Anyone who isn’t masking is evil, irredeemably so. How can you be so shallow that you’d make a big deal about having to have someone repeat themselves a few times to make sure you heard them right? Isn’t that better than dead bodies everywhere?
Fah. I can’t caricature these people sufficiently to reach satire. How many of them believe that the dreaded COVID-19, and its potpourri of variants, is still the deadliest thing known to man? Every now and than I see news articles about some new COVID-19 variant, and people are still stating they have COVID and have to isolate, which makes me coin a phrase: “You can take the people out of the pandemic, but you can’t take the pandemic out of the people.” If we get the Wuhan virus in our house, we have a cold. Because that’s all it is anymore.
Just depends if you think they’re wearing the mask to signal or if they should wear the mask. I’ll be honest, if I get sick and I’m still running about, I’ll wear a mask to try and limit how much of my illness I’m spreading. I was told by “everyone” that they are effective, so when I’m sick, I wear one and go about my day as normal. So if you see someone wearing a mask, take that as a sign, not that they are trying not to get sick, but that they are sick and they’re wearing it for your protection. Treat them like they have the plague and keep your distance.
I just went to an orthopedic clinic, and in the lobby, about a third of those waiting had masks on (and not effective ones.) Half of the staff visible had masks, also the useless cloth kind.
Masks of different materials have different abilities to restrict the movement of particles of different size.
Different infectious agents are carried on particles of different size.
Whether a person becomes infected by a pathogen depends on the person’s immunity and the number of infectious particles they’re exposed to.
Therefore, I think people should be free to make their own risk/benefit analyses and decide when to/when not to wear masks. There obviously will be people who wear masks to virtue-signal, but I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to random passersby.
I look at the still-masked that aren’t of a certain age not with anger, but with scorn.
Stupid people, I have long since learned, are a simple fact of life. So are smart people who want to impress you with a display of “how much they care for others,” usually referred to as virtue signalling these days.
So wear your masks, dear fools, hypochondriacs and narcissists. No skin off my nose (pardon the sort-of pun).