I think in many of these places the staff is going to stop wearing them, or wear them at 50%. They are the ones most affected, wearing them 8 hours a day. I am not wearing a mask 8 hours a day. They will probably be more determinant of masks having an expiration date or being a forever policy.
I’ve seen one business here so far (Quimby’s bookstore) still requiring masks. Not sure how many other businesses are continuing to require masking.
I expect many will keep a sign on the door saying “masks required” but will stop enforcing the rule.
(although, now that I think about it, last year after the first round of vaccinations, almost all places around here said “masks requested for those not fully vaccinated,” which in realty meant “no masks will be worn here.”
This sign was a more proactive one—that they know the CDC rules but here you have to mask anyway.
I live and work in Santa Clara County, California. Our County Public Health Officer Sara Cody said yesterday that we can drop the masks, and I think we’re the last county to do so, at least for indoor places other than nursing homes, jails, and hospitals.
Just five minutes ago, our partner in charge of these things sent around a memo saying that we can now drop the masks inside our office, unless you really want to wear one. I tore mine off immediately, but see other co-workers still wearing them. I’m vaxxed to the gills, and we’re not in a public-facing business for the most part, so I’ll be daring.
I have a trip to Cozumel coming up at the beginning of next month, postponed from 2 years ago. I’ve decided I’m going to be extra careful for the next few weeks to minimize the chances of having to miss out. After that, I’ll probably go back to doing the minimum that law, store policy, and basic common sense require.
We ate at a restaurant last week for the Mardi Gras buffet.
Not dead yet.*
*we were 2 out of a total of 3 patrons who wore masks in the buffet line.
I have only wear a mask when in a clinic setting , or when asked to in a store if it was at the door. This have done for the last 18 months.
Using the CDC’s new "COVID community level" metric, my county is currently in the “medium” category. As a result, starting Monday this week my employer no longer requires on-site employees to wear masks, so about 2/3 of the people here have stopped wearing masks.
Using the CDC’s previous metric, “COVID community transmission level”, my county is still just barely in the “high” category. I’ll probably continue wearing my mask at work until the end of next week, by which time I expect the daily new case count to have dropped a good bit further.
I should point out that while mask wearing here at the office has dropped precipitously, the on-site people are only about 1/3 of our total workforce; 2/3 of the staff here are still working from home. Not sure how many are doing this out of concern for exposure to COVID, and how many are doing it for other reasons (convenience, no commute, etc.).
I’m so confused about all these COVID risk calculation websites and don’t have the wherewithal to figure out how accurate - or not - they are.
The CDC rates my community’s transmission level as high. COVID Act Now rates our area’s risk as high, down from very high - woo hoo, I guess? But our city’s website calls it “mild, improving.”
This weekend I might go to a restaurant for a family event. If I go, ‘twill be the first time I’ve been inside a restaurant in two years. There’s just no way to even wear a mask while eating. Not sure it’s worth the risk but kinda wanna go.
Oregon has dropped its indoor mask mandate and my employer has followed suit. Nobody at work today is wearing a mask. I jumped on the bandwagon and decided to forgo the mask as well as I’m pretty much in an empty room this week.
I feel very naked today.
Did they drop the pants mandate too?
FWIW, I’m not convinced that’s some sort of mask mandate resistance, so much as ignorance and stupidity.
Our mask mandates have been effectively unenforceable for the entire pandemic, and yet despite that, we get a surprising number of people who just wear their masks poorly (under the nose, or with the nose pieces practically unbent) instead of not at all. It perplexes me; why bother, if you’re not going to wear it right, especially if you’re not actually in danger of being fined for noncompliance?
Oh, if I implied that, I didn’t mean to. This is certainly not a mask mandate resistance kind of neighborhood I live in. It’s sloppiness or laziness. Still today, my local grocery store is about 80% mask-wearing after the mandate was lifted on Feb 28.
Yes, but not the spats mandate.
I am the epitome of coolness today.
I think there are many aspects of life where people absorb basic advice, take some sort of concrete-but-inadequate step to follow that advice, and then convince themselves that they can just cross that item off of their list without any further thought. The example that always gets my attention is how people wear helmets while riding a bicycle. Most folks have it tilted way too far back, exposing their forehead. Similarly, people will tell themselves they’re saving for retirement, without actually doing the math to see whether they’re saving enough. Or they’ll put on a seatbelt, but have the lap belt riding across their gut instead of down low across their pelvis.
Masks? Just one more instance of this. Especially for men, facial stubble tends to cause the mask to creep downward every time we move our jaw, so in fairly short order our nose gets exposed unless we keep pulling it up - and some folks just never notice that, never pull the mask up after it has crept down off of their nose, because they put their mask on and mentally cross it off of their list as “done”.
I always wondered about the efficacy of wearing a mask over a giant bushy beard, myself. Seems like your breath can just go through the beard hair between your face and mask pretty much unhindered on entrance and exit. True mask theater, albeit not by intention. (personally, I’ve been extra clean shaven during the pandemic for the opposite reason- I want that mask right up on my face!)
Personally, I think it’s more that people have good intentions, but then comfort/convenience gets in the way, and they do what’s easy, even if it’s not necessarily what’s right. They save for retirement, but they can’t force themselves to suffer a little bit, so they don’t save enough. They are willing to wear a mask, but having it over their nose bothers them, so they pull it down a little. Low bike helmets can be hotter, so they push them back a little. And so on and so forth.
I kind of think that assuming people are going to do the most comfortable/least effort way of doing anything is the way to go when designing consumer products or end-user processes.
I shaved for Omicron, but I hadn’t really bothered before that. It made a big difference with masks.
I had some 3M reusable cloth masks that always seemed pretty comfortable to me. Shaved the beard, better seal, and all of the sudden the mask is annoying to breath with. Similar with some KN95 masks.
Fortunately I’d gotten some boat style masks from Hong Kong that are very easy to breath with. They seem to offer a good seal, supposedly excellent filtration, and are very easy to breath with. Easy enough that I don’t even notice it.
Mask wearing was a completely ad hoc process. It was entirely on the user to determine how to do it best. Plus it was something that people had never really done before. In retrospect, perhaps expecting 100% compliance to any fixed standard was somewhat unrealistic.
I am still seeing a number of those around here, and frankly it makes me more likely to shop there. The Korean supermarket has the best mask compliance of anywhere we shop.