Yes, I’m with you. Vaccination isn’t 100%, and I sure as hell don’t want to get it, and even if I’m asymptomatic, give it to someone else.
Answering for me… Because vaccines aren’t 100% effective. Because my mother is immune compromised, and if i developed a mild case but passed it to her, i could kill her.
Vaccines aren’t 100%. I don’t want to get sick, and I don’t want to be a vector. If everybody in the room is vaccinated, the odds of transmission go down drastically for all involved.
Also, if I participated in an event with multiple unvaccinated and unmasked people, I would feel morally implicated in any potential COVID infections passed around there.
This is a shift in the social contract that makes me raise an eyebrow. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that people that have reached adulthood have likely been a link in the chain of transmission of disease that has gone on to kill someone. I’ve probably passed on a cold to another person who passed it to someone else and some number of steps later an elderly person caught it and died. Through how many degrees of separation should we feel morally responsible? 1? 2? 10?
A common reason people say for continuing to wear masks is that they don’t want to transmit Covid to an elderly or at-risk person, but that transmission risk also exists for the flu. We typically don’t wear masks during flu season even though many at-risk people would get very sick or even die if they were to catch the flu. I think the risk of a vaccinated person transmitting Covid to an at-risk person is very, very low. I’m certainly all for wearing masks and being safe, but we should be realistic about the risk in comparison to other similar situations.
I agree. And when being in a trivial amount of discomfort might save someone’s life, well, I’m being realistic in my cost-benefit analysis of that situation.
I thought Ohio’s mask mandate wasn’t over until June 2 but I guess I’m wrong. I’ve just been puttin’ on my mask because some places still require masks (grocery, gym) and I don’t go too many places.
I went to the county Board of Elections the other day and came in with my mask. When I got inside most of the workers in the cube farm were unmasked but I saw some put theirs up when I came in, and the guy who came to the desk to help me put his on. It kinda seemed like their policy was “no masks needed unless a masked customer comes in.” Upon exiting I realized all their mask signs were gone so I guess they don’t require masks…?
Last night I went to Home Depot and put on my mask. No mask signs on the doors. All the workers were wearing them, though. About half of the customers were. I kinda got the feeling that the workers are not in the mood to deal with percentages and probabilities and either they weren’t vaccinated or were exercising an abundance of caution.
Me, I’m going with caution. I’m not ready to be maskless yet. Although it looks like my county and the neighboring county are at and near 50% vaccinated so that’s cool.
We didn’t. After all, wearing masks used to be bizarre and scare people. I may wear masks at large public gatherings, especially during flu season, going forward.
By that logic, we should wear masks forever.
Look, you have a problem with masks? Fine. You’ll never be in my home, or my office. I have zero control (and obviously zero influence) over you.
But I’m not on board with the anti-mask stuff.
Ever? (I mean for not wearing a mask, not for other reasons. 
)
If this is so, did you just fail to think of it in 2019 and before? You could have caught a flu and passed it on and killed an elderly person.
Let it go, okay? I get that we’re in different worlds about this whole thing. You live your life, I’ll live mine.
If I’m lucky, the two will never meet (in an epidemiological sense, of course).
ETA: COVID ain’t the flu. Surely you’ve figured that out by now.
I’ll let it go when you do. You can’t tell me to let it go on a message board and then throw a line in there just so you get the last word. Covid is not the flu, but your standard was the quoted part above. The flu kills elderly people and others.
The comment that prompted all of this wasn’t a live and let live. It was in response to a poster who was going to require vaccinated people to wear masks at his next social event when the CDC says it is unnecessary for them to do so. Again, not a live and let live. It is a you do what I say.
Are you serious? You jumped in and responded to my post agreeing with someone else about continued masking. I did not engage you on the subject.
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I wasn’t talking to you. I’m not telling you to “do what I say.” I was talking about what I do, in my life.
I really don’t understand why you seem to have a problem with that.
Fair enough. I’ll drop it.
I’m confused. The guy who thought it was government overreach to tell churches that they weren’t allowed to have full, in-person congregations thinks that a private home or business owner shouldn’t be able to set their own rules for entrance?
One kills people. The other weeds out people that weren’t really wanted in the first place.
I have no problem with the poster who wants to require masks at the social gathering and do not question his privilege to require them. I was just pointing out my disagreement with that policy and suggesting that it was not a “live and let live” policy.
Apparently the CDC guidance that masks aren’t needed for vaccinated individuals DID increase interest in vaccination among the unvaccinated. I’d thought there was too much emphasis on “Yay, we don’t need masks!” and not enough on the “for vaccinated people part.”
Wrong, according to CNN:
Data obtained exclusively by CNN shows that interest in getting vaccinated against Covid-19 increased right after Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced two weeks ago that vaccinated people could take off their masks.
“This shows incentives matter,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University School of Medicine. “People needed a carrot, and the carrot was the ability to drop the mask in most settings.”
The data comes from vaccines.gov, where people look up vaccination sites by zip code.
On the afternoon of May 13, just after Walensky’s announcement, the number of visits to the site started to climb, hitting its second highest number of visitors since the website was launched on April 30.
And in case you’re wondering, as I was, whether people were following through and getting the vaccine, they were: vaccinations also increased right after the CDC guidance. Yes, it coincided with opening the vaccine to 12-16-year-olds, but the numbers for people 16 and over, which had been in sharp decline since April, jumped up from 546,000 doses per day on May 18th to about 600,000 on the 22nd.
It was at least part of my motivation for doing it now rather than waiting longer. Not because I am eager to go around maskless, but because I don’t trust that the unmasked people I’m seeing now are really all vaccinated.
This is a fair point. However, COVID is far more deadly than any disease I may have passed on in my lifetime. It’s entirely possible to have no symptoms and yet pass it on. Flu, for example, kills on the order of 50,000 people per year in the US. COVID has killed over 600,000. At the current death rate it’s on track to kill over 200,000 in the next year.
Until the infection and death rates come much further down, it’s still appropriate to treat COVID differently.
Yes. Wearing a mask was never presented as a reasonable option before 2020. Now that we know it can be helpful, anybody with flu symptoms who has to go out in public should definitely wear a mask.
The CDC says only vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks. An event coordinator can say, “Anybody who is not vaccinated doesn’t have to wear a mask” but then non-vaccinated people will show up without masks putting everybody at risk. Or, the coordinator can say, “Everybody wear a mask”.
I was at Safeway this morning. The sign used to say “masks required.” Today it said “Unvaccinated people are encouraged to wear a mask.”
So, yes, I think we’re nearing “the end of masking.”