I’ve masked up in places where you’d think it might be looked askance at… like airports, almost any store, a friend’s birthday party… and my neighborhood pub*.
Not a peep, not even a lingering puzzled look (except our only right-winger at church, who said “So, you’re still doing that?” just to see if he’d get a rise).
.
*I can have a pint and a burger there pretty safely. If I’m worried (like now, about to go visit my almost-centenarian relatives), they have a huge snooker-and-darts room. And rarely does anyone play either.
It used to be that very few people looked twice at my N95, but since state and federal government essentially announced that the pandemic is over and everyone should get back in the pool, I notice that fewer people are also wearing masks and I’m getting more weird or scornful looks. This isn’t going to keep me from protecting myself, but the steady pressure of outsiders telling me I’m being overly cautious is starting to weigh on me.
On the bright side, now that numbers do seem to have settled down (even given the almost complete abandonment of testing) and the weather is warming up, we’ve felt safe enough to go to a restaurant with patio dining! It was nice being able to look at something besides the inside of our house during a meal.
I was on a jury a few weeks ago and I masked every time I entered the courthouse. I would say maybe 20% of people in the building were masked - about the same in our courtroom. No one gave me any looks being masked. I plan to continue masking for certain situations, and overall our level of alertness compared to the earlier in the pandemic is much lower, but I would not call it complacent.
I still mask when I’m out in public, basically anytime out of the house I’m not in my car. I’m in Canada, and there are still a fair number of people who still mask as well, and some places, like any place medical-related, and my mother’s retirement home, still mandate it.
Well, what are your symptoms? And, shouldn’t the vaccine have made you immune to contracting and spreading Covid, like vaccines do with Polio, Measles, Mumps, and Rubella? I mean, the CDC doesn’t even have the Covid shot on their list of recommended vaccines. nor their overall list of all vaccines.
Happened to my step-brother and he DID retire. It was a second retirement and a job he didn’t need, thankfully. But he’s in his mid-50’s and found even a hint of perfectly normal job stress (which was intrinsic to the job) immediately exhausted him and compromised his quick decision-making abilities. Days off - fine. Working days - nightmare.
After fighting it for nearly a year and undergoing every medical test known to man, he pulled the plug. Much happier now, but who knows what long-term cognitive effects might linger?
You do realize that no vaccine is perfect, right? The polio vaccine i took (the live one) carried a small risk of giving you polio. It was also contagious. I have a friend who had smallpox. She’d been vaccinated, which is probably why she not only recovered but didn’t have a lot of scarring. But she was pretty damn sick and spent some time in the hospital.
I think it is good that the world is pretty much back to normal. Here in the UK there are no restrictions, no masking is required and you very rarely see any out and about.
It isn’t complacency, we now have vaccines that protect the majority from the worst effects of virus and the majority of general public have simply decided that they are able to live with the added risk of this additional airborne disease.
Covid hasn’t gone away but the 1918-20 flu never went away either and we learned to live with that.
Since we are bringing up anecdotes, most of the people who I know who have caught Covid have also taken the Covid shot. Yet, I did not, and have not. And yet, we were forced to proclaim that it is “safe and effective”, and in some cases, it was mandatory to take. All this, with the first talk about “breakthrough cases” being taboo, but now it is the norm.
Vaccines make you immune to a disease. That is the definition. Yes, vaccines fail some people, and some people get injured from vaccines, but not only are we not allowed to discuss any of those aspects of it, but, if the Covid shot’s main benefit is that it lessens the symptoms, well, that’s not a vaccine. It’s an antihistamine.
This, despite the effectiveness going to near zero, which has required multiple boosters of it in a very short time, and politicians announcing that they will not take it before it came out - and any other treatments being publicly shunned.
That’s tragic that you lost those people. I feel bad for you. Fortunately, both of my parents are still alive and in good health, but one of my biggest fears is having to deal with the inevitability of their deaths. I would rather die myself - especially if it would prolong their lives at all. I feel for you. I myself do not handle the deaths of loved ones very well.
But, there is a very good chance that your relatives did not die from Covid.
I’m going to assume that you can forking read, but I’ll bold it for you as you are clearly slow of mind. Jesus, you’re giving Sam Stone a serious run for his money and not reading your own cites, and you’ve been back for 24 hoursish. You didn’t even read your own TITLE.
You’d be wrong. There’s a 100% chance they died of covid. My uncle and aunt caught it before there was a vaccine, and it destroyed them. My mother was vaccinated, but originally immune compromised. I watched her die of covid pneumonia after it has killed her brain. A close friend in Canada tragically died of covid just after vaccines became universally available in the US, but when Canada still only had enough to vaccinate the elderly.
It’s true that covid is much less deadly now that pretty much every one has prior exposure, via vaccines, encountering the virus, or both. But it remains a nasty disease, and one that much more likely to leave you disabled than most of the other stuff circulating.