For quite a while. Until medical experts decide we don’t need them.
Also I really hope wearing masks becomes more acceptable during flu season. Flu rates are down 99%. I haven’t had a cold, flu or any other respiratory infections in the last year and I love it.
I wore masks on airplanes before covid. I will certainly continue to do so.
I had to laugh at all the people worried that they would suffocate of they wore a mask for more than a couple of minutes. I’ve literally worn them on overnight flights – because they made me more comfortable, due to reducing dehydration.
I’ll probably wait and see what social norms develop. But I’ll wear one if i think i might be coming down with a cold or something.
I expect to return to buffets. But maybe i should do more research.
Me too! Especially given the flu is only contagious a day before you’re symptomatic so even if we only manage to normalize people with symptoms wearing masks, we’ll vastly reduce the incidence of flu.
Yeah I have MANY questions about how buffets are gonna work in the future, if at all. That video is terrifying, and absolutely true. Please watch it if you haven’t already and, uh… be warned.
I’m not sure it will be quite a while for medical experts to say we don’t need them. If everyone who wants the shot gets one by mid-June, there would be no reason to wear masks in July.
Are they going to be any worse in the future than they’ve always been, though?
I’ve been to some fancy buffets in my day! I remember one at a famous Japanese hotel in Mexico City, so many years ago…
But the post-pandemic logistics of how a buffet should work are radically different, I’d think?
Now we’re all just a little more aware that everyone else is geysering potentially germ laden invisible aerosols everywhere they go…
How about instead we normalize that sick people isolate at home instead of putting on a mask and going out in public. That’s how we solve the continuous infection problem: take the damn day off!! Nothing you were going to do is so important a that you have to make yourself miserable and other people sick for it.
I’ve spent my whole professional life in an industry where the slightest sniffle or tummy ache = day off, period, no questions asked. Oddly enough business survives just fine. As do the people who stay home when they’re less than 100%.
On Tuesday. it will be 2 weeks since my second shot - so in theory I’m all set to go.
I’ll keep wearing my mask whenever I go out, indefinitely, because
The other older adults (50+) in the household get their second shots this coming weekend - so basically we’ll all be caught up until my son gets home from college in mid-May.
I’m not really sure how my behavior will change in general. We probably won’t eat in restaurants again any time soon. We’re debating visiting the in-laws in Florida in a couple months, but will probably drive rather than flying (they’ve both been immunized also).
We may continue to use grocery shopping services, but I’ll feel better about the occasional dash out for missed items - I have not grocery shopped in person in over a year and there are things I need that the online services don’t list as available.
The flu is contagious beginning the day before and 5-7 days after symptoms start per the CDC:
People with flu are most contagious in the first 3-4 days after their illness begins. Some otherwise healthy adults may be able to infect others beginning 1 day before symptoms develop and up to 5 to 7 days after becoming sick.
Symptoms: Cough; Sneeze
[image]
www.cdc.gov › flu › disease › spread
That blacklight stuff is largely a BS parlor trick. They do the same technique to teach trainee nurses about sterile procedure.
The big difference versus reality is the amount of actual infectious material delivered by the sick person and the actual dose picked up by the uninfected versus the minimum dose necessary to trigger successful infection.
Those demos are on the same order as “10 milligrams of botulism toxin is enough to kill half of humanity”. Sure it is. If you could somehow titrate out 4 billion equal doses from that single 10mg sample and deliver them losslessly to every other person on Earth. Hint: the hard part is the second step, not the gathering 10mg of botulism toxin.
(bolding mine)
Yes there will! Far too many people don’t WANT the shot. And while I have not read any articles correlating anti-vaxxers with maskholes in general, I suspect there’s a pretty significant overlap.
This means it’ll still be out there, spreading and mutating. And since the efficacy of the existing vaccines against new variants is still in question, masks should still be worn until these idjits succeed in killing themselves off.
There’s a restaurant that opened near me just before the start of the pandemic last year subtitled “Premium buffet”. It shut down almost immediately (and made a surprisingly fast transition to decrepitude, with weeds growing everywhere, trash piled up, etc.).
It recently reopened as “Premium all-you-can-eat”. I’m not entirely sure about the logistics, but I can see there’s no more buffet bar. I’m pretty sure you just ask for more food and they bring it. I don’t think I’ll miss the bar if that turns out to be the new normal.
Sigh. Only contagious a day before vs up to 5 days before like Covid, not that it isn’t contagious once you have symptoms.
Are you under the impression that everyone gets paid time off every time they get the slightest sniffle or tummy ache? And that nobody gets fired if that happens with any frequency? And that everyone’s got somebody else who can go pick up the cough syrup and the cat food for them, or their kids from school?
It would, I agree, be excellent if we had a world that worked that way. And I agree that there’s been a lot of pressure for people to come in to work sick when there’s no reason why they should and are in jobs that theoretically give paid sick leave, and that that should go away. But in the world we’re actually in, yes, some people go to work or to do errands sick because they genuinely have no better choices. If they at least wear masks, that would be some improvement.
You’re 100% right we don’t live in that world … yet. But if the experience of the last year’s not impetus enough to move us to make our politicians make that world a reality, … well we deserve the perennial endemic diseases we’ll be wallowing in.
My point was simply that it CAN be done; I’m living proof of it. There’s no physics rendering it impossible. We simply lack the will to do so. So far.
If I feel sick, I DO stay home. I am fortunate to have a job where I can work from home – which has been a godsend this year. But I often have a sniffle. And that sniffle doesn’t always develop into an actual cold. It might just have been allergies. I feel like there’s a level of “maybe I have something?” where a mask is a decent compromise.
The poor countries won’t be vaccinated any time soon. A new strain that escapes the vaccine can potentially arise from these parts of the world, and then it will probably cause COVID-22. However, mRNA vaccines can be quickly adjusted to counter it. I am hopeful.
Yeah, it is ultimately in everyone’s best interests for every single human to get vaccinated. The scale of the task is vast … but it’s worth it.
We got lazy because it’s been 100 years since the last global pandemic. But viruses aren’t going away any time soon, so all of this (waves hands around) is a useful fire drill – it prepares us for the next pandemic. That’s coming, too.