Granted, most of my recent travel has been to either red states (Texas, Nevada, Kansas, Missouri) or red parts of blue states (Inyo county, CA), but I have rarely seen masks either at home or elsewhere. It’s definitely the unusual exception in all those places.
The larger distancing is more or less habit though, I’ll grant you. And I get a bit squirmy when someone gets too close in line. But it’s not usually the full six feet, but more of a larger-than-before distance that’s about 4 feet if I had to guess. And people don’t pay attention to the pre-marked circles on the floor that’s for sure.
It’s not 2019 exactly, but a lot closer to there than to early 2022, that’s for sure.
I’d say it’s unusual here in coastal CA outside of specialized places. But it is utterly unremarkable. Excluding professional masking (retail, medical) – some people just mask. Maybe 1 in 20-30. Okay then, whatever, you do you. Is it really all that different elsewhere in the US?
Here in Chicago’s western suburbs, masking is certainly far less common than it was a year ago (much less mid-2020), but it’s not gone entirely. At certain stores that I go to, like the grocery store or the drugstore, all of the staff are still masked (which I would guess is store policy), and some of the patrons still are, too, though it does tend to be the seniors who are still masking.
Restaurants are busy, and seem to be, for the most part, back to normal. But, downtown Chicago (where my office is) is still just a shell of what it was three years ago; the commuter trains are maybe at 1/4 capacity, and the pedestrian traffic on the streets is nothing like what it used to be.
This is a very good point – a vast number of people no longer go to the office. That’s a huge difference from 2019, and has an effect on transit and retail. It’s not like 2019. (Hell, lots of ways it is better)
I’m not exactly counting the work-from-home shift as a pandemic response anymore; we’ve got the same lesser traffic and rather empty downtown as well. But that’s because people are demanding to WFH because it’s better, not because they’re afraid.
There’s still a fair amount of masking where I am. 1/2 of the people where I work choose to mask. At the grocery store, I’d guess maybe 1/8 do. I mask if I’m in tight quarters.
It just occurred to me while reading this:
If a majority of us have shifted to work-from-home habits, I suspect the restaurants are getting a lot less of a lunch-time crowd. While they might have made an almost-decent profit in weekday volume before the pandemic, they’re not seeing those crowds any more because most of us aren’t socializing with our co-workers for an hour (at least once a week if not every work-day). And raising prices is often the last feeble attempt at staying afloat before throwing in the (dish)towel.
Many people also changed their dining habits regardless of where they work. For a time, we couldn’t eat out and some of us, no doubt, learned we could live without restaurants and pocket the savings. I haven’t seen the numbers, but I suspect the restaurant industry has permanently lost millions of customers and needs to make up that shortfall by increasing prices.
It’s probably not the same people who are always masking, week after week, though, and the reason they’re masking might not be covid. The US (at least, some parts of it) are learning the lesson now that Japan learned a century ago from the Kansas Flu, and are masking up when experiencing symptoms of respiratory disease, and that could be a cold, or flu, or lots of other things.
I’m seeing maybe 1 in 10 people masking where I live (Dallas). It’s rare enough that it’s notable at this point, and you start to wonder why they’re doing it- do they have someone medically fragile at home? Are they paranoid? What’s their deal?
I’m not saying masking is wrong, but it’s just very uncommon around here, and at this point it doesn’t even seem to follow any sort of socio-economic pattern- just random one-off people or families who are masked up while everyone else isn’t.
I don’t see even 1 in 10 masking at this point ( in NYC) but it’s also very dependent on where. If I’m at a medical facility, the staff and many of the patients will be wearing masks* although it’s no longer legally required. If I’m at the supermarket, almost no one is masked ( except Asians and a lot of them wore masks pre-COVID)
* Even places where people weren’t masked pre-covid, like radiology centers