On another board, a group of us have been discussing whether or not “masking while sick” could take hold in the United States as it seems to have done pre-COVID in countries like Japan, Korea, China, etc.
Someone proposed a good question, and I thought I’d post it here since there are Dopers living in those countries: Does etiquette and custom dictate that in Japan/Korea/China … someone who knows they have seasonal allergies but are having obvious symptoms (sneezing, runny nose) … is that person likely to feel compelled to wear face coverings the same way they would if they felt a cold (or worse) coming on?
Generally, the group over there understands East Asian masking norms to be as follows:
Wear when the outside air is of poor quality
Wear when you are coming down with something and are going to be around people
… but the case we weren’t sure about …
Wear when allergy symptoms are obvious and you yourself know “it’s just allergies”, but other people can’t tell whether or not you are contagious (?)
This isn’t a great answer and I hope it’s not seen as a hijack, but I sometimes wear a face mask specifically to help with allergies. For example, I have a mask with a removable filter that allows me to stand a few feet away from someone smoking and I can’t smell the smoke at all. I’m extremely allergic to cigarette smoke. It also helps a lot with dust allergies, and in my IT job I sometimes have to crack open really dusty computers or climb under dusty desks.
I live in the US so this isn’t answering your question sufficiently, but my point was to note that people with allergies might wear a particular kind of mask for more than social reasons.
I’m not sure how socially ‘compelled’ people feel about it though. There’s a decades long history of people masking not only for disease but for seasonal allergies and air pollution. It’s just something people do naturally anyway at this point.
Not sure anybody would really complain, though, if somebody with allergies wasn’t masked, at least up to last year. It’s not like mask wearing is universal, even there.
But of course, 2020 and COVID have greatly changed behaviors, even in countries without a stigma attached to mask wearing, so YMMV for 2020 and beyond.
If there’s a social tradition that decent unselfish people mask to prevent the spread of disease, it’s easy to imagine why someone with allergies would still mask, since other people just don’t know that. What comes to mind by analogy is the definition of assault - would a reasonable person feel the threat of harm and be scared by my actions? It would depend on the context and the level of inconvenience of wearing a mask, of course.
Given that not wearing a mask in the U.S. right now is an unambiguous marker that you are an asshole, if you hypothetically somehow knew that you had total sterilizing immunity to the virus, what would you do when out and about? Going into a grocery store and encountering strangers I’d just wear some kind of comfortable cloth mask - not needed, but not at all inconvenient. Whereas if it were some context where I might otherwise have to wear an N95 for 8 hours straight, obviously there be a good incentive to just explain why I didn’t need to.