I wear a mask at all times indoors (outside of my own home). No exceptions.
I’m vaccinated. I still do it. Seems like a good idea.
And when I have to take the subway (which I avoid as much as humanly possible), I wear a real N95 mask. Despite the fact that masks are, in fact, still required on the NYC subway, about 20% (my eyeball count) of riders don’t bother.
Mask wearing here in New Hampshire had dropped to nearly 0% in the weeks following the CDC announcement about vaccinated people no longer needing to wear one. It has noticeably increased the last few weeks but is still nowhere near where it was early this year.
I never stopped wearing one in the shops, because why not? It costs very little, it might help, and anything to normalize it for unvaccinated folks has the potential to be helpful. Plus, COVID is far from licked.
Update: as of 3 weeks ago, my company requires masking up indoors at work. I’m grateful for that but the actual office workers do not have to mask up. (I work in a cafe in an office building, so the bosses and companies are different). They’re not full capacity for the building and nobody comes in 5x a week. What worries/annoys me is that compliance could be better, as I KNOW that many of my coworkers and customer regulars are vaccinated, but they have kids under 12 that are not. Happy to say I have not witnessed anyone “Obviously Sick” drag themselves to work or get sent home. That just leaves the asymptomatic, I guess though the vax rate in Minneapolis is decent.
I’m at a small party (6 people) and we are hanging out outdoors with masks on. So … Yes.
I am getting so mad at the anti-vax idiots that I struggle with this issue daily. Me wearing a mask doesn’t protect me, it protects them. We have just barely hit 51% vaccinated, that means half the people I interact with aren’t vaccinated.
Why the hell should I bother trying to protect them when they certainly don’t care? Everyone over the age of 12 who wants to be vaccinated ARE vaccinated, the rest are the ones driving the pandemic. Fuck them all.
Then I remember that not everyone who wants to be vaccinated can be successfully vaccinated, and that I can’t hurt young children just because their parents don’t care if they live or die, and mask up. Goddammit.
Yes, my co-worker’s child’s daycare just had to close for a week when one of the infants got covid. This is in a highly compliant region.
Yeah. I’ll continue to mask up, and I will do it properly. It will also be done grudgingly and with many muttered curses at all the bare faces surrounding me.
I have invested in masks that DO protect me. It makes me a lot happier with the world. For a while that was tricky, but right now it’s trivially easy to buy N95, KN95, KF94, medical/surgical masks, and a variety of seriously-filtered cloth masks.
Right now I’m pretty happy with the boxy 3D KF94 masks. They are light and reasonably affordable (especially if you re-use them) and seem to seal nicely around my face. And I like that they don’t interfere with my glasses, nor do they touch my lips, so it’s easy to see and speak.
Depending on which type you get, masks probably can protect you, and they can decrease the viral load that infects you, which may make you less sick if you do get an infection. As @puzzlegal alluded to, the choice of mask matters: N95 is probably the best, followed by KF-94 and KN-95.
OKOKOK, I’ll order some. And I’ll wear them. And resent having to do it because of those idiot anti-vaxxers the entire time. That’ll show them!!!
Here’s the site I used to figure out which masks to buy:
I ordered the powecom ones.
Thanks for that BBB. For the record, I’m not concerned about protecting me. I’m fully vaccinated AND I am fully recovered from a break-through delta case.
I’ll buy them and I’ll wear them and I’ll resent every penny and second I have to spend doing this because I’m surrounded by selfish assholes.
The anti-vaxxers are a problem, but the delta variant is so infectious that I wear masks even living an area with high vaccination coverage. As I mentioned when delta first started tearing its way through the South, the delta variant is a game-changer; it’s almost like we’re back to dealing with the original COVID in the pre-vaccine era.
The problem with anti-vaxxers is that they’re a) giving the virus a greater chance to mutate; and b) completely overwhelming our healthcare system in an increasing number of regions. I don’t care how advanced our hospital systems are: with this many COVID patients, it’s reducing the standard of medical care for everyone - even for non-COVID patients.
Me too.
FWIW, I ordered the style with the band that goes around the top of your head and the back of your head. The ear loop style causes me to swear spontaneously. I’m trying to keep long hair, eyeglass ear pieces and hearing aids behind my ears. Mask ear loops fling my $2300 per hearing aids halfway across the grocery store parking lot when I try to take them off. Since I don’t want to be blind, deaf or shave my head, the mask ear loops are what had to go. Yeah, I resent those mask holes+vaxxcretions too.
I prefer the over-the-ear style – I find them a lot easier to take on and off, and just as comfortable. But there’s some reason to believe the behind-the-head style seals a bit better, so I might be wearing some of those going forward, depending on what I’m doing.
I do not step outside the door without wearing a mask.
Why? The CDC guidelines don’t recommend a mask outdoors unless it’s a crowded event.
Bullshit.
The CDC guidelines say it is generally not required in many outdoor circumstances. They certainly don’t advocate against wearing one.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/outdoor-activities.html
The guidelines don’t recommend wearing a mask in many outdoor situations. Neither do they recommend against wearing a mask in any situation except, “struggling to breath”, as far as i know.
I don’t wear a mask off I’m going out for a walk in my sparsely populated neighborhood, nor if I’m doing yard work. But if I’m going out someplace where i will want a mask, i generally put it on when i leave the house and take it off when i get home. That simpler than deciding where to put it, making sure it stays clean, and doesn’t contaminate anything else, etc. It just stays on my nose.
That’s not the way I’ve ever heard “don’t recommend” used.
If someone says “I don’t recommend you go in that room”, that’s a warning, not agnostic.
I don’t recommend eating in that restaurant.
I don’t recommend walking in that park after midnight.
I don’t recommend driving while drunk.
Those are all warnings.
The CDC thinks it’s not terribly necessary to wear a mask outdoors for most people in most situations. That’s far removed from them not recommending that you wear a mask outdoors.