Absolutely. I don’t see him as a well, this wasn’t intentional, but a faceless entity. He is one of the people I interact with during the day. I like to see his smile, his laugh, his frown. I think this idea is pretty basic and I’m not sure why posters are fighting it so much.
I… never knew this was why people wore sunglasses.
Just spitballin’ here, maybe the 500,000+ dead people?
Sure. And now the CDC is saying that if you are vaccinated, you don’t need to wear masks. Why are people fighting that? Follow the science.
“You don’t need to wear masks” /= “You must not wear masks”
Right?
I hear his laugh, I can see his smile or frown in his eyes. If it’s someone I see regularly and the place isn’t busy (the asst. manager at the coffee shop comes to mind) I might even chat with him a bit. I’m actually quite gregarious – enough that some of the regular clerks at the coffee shop I went to when I was commuting would sometimes hail me in public, (like, when we happened to bump into each other at a bus stop) and we’d chat a bit.
But I am happy we are all wearing masks
I think we hit 600K country-wide pretty soon. Unless vaccine take-up is better than I fear. And yeah, I LIKE most of the clerks I see regularly. They are at very high risk. I wear a mask because I care about them.
(not at the big grocery store, though. I get a different clerk every time I go, and don’t know any of them. I mean, I don’t want to inadvertently kill any of them, either, but if it happened, I might never even hear about it.)
Of course not. Although many states like mine have laws on the books that forbid wearing masks in public. I would support tweaking them.
Because that clerk has no frigging way of knowing who has been vaccinated. It’s such a bizarre recommendation. If it had been coupled with a quick-to-scan vaccine passport, I would have agreed the science makes sense. (I would have objected to the politics, but not to the science.) But how does it make sense to tell everyone “no one needs to wear a mask in public” when we still have high rates of spread in a lot of places?
Private health guidelines (what’s safe to do with friends and family) can certainly rely on private trust. Public health guidelines (what to do at church, or at the supermarket) ought to be linked to public measures. Local % vaccinated might possibly encourage some folks to get jabbed. Local rate of infections is less likely to motivate people, but probably makes more sense. (and has the virtue of automatically switching back on if we get some nasty vaccine-resistant variant that runs rampant somewhere) But “hey, each customer gets to decide whether to wear a mask, and there’s no way for you, captive grocery clerk who must interact with them, to have any way of knowing how risky they are”??? That is … an odd policy choice.
I fully agree with you that there is no ready or even possible short term enforcement mechanism. I also fear that politics plays a role in these decisions. I am obviously not a scientist, but I would bet a shiny nickel that when this all shakes out, those who know have made the decision that paper masks, often worn improperly and ill-fitted, have very little utility in preventing spread–as borne out by state by state data-- and that even though people will lie and get away with not wearing masks in public, the push that this will be for the middle 10 to 20 percent who are hesitant to take the vaccine will have far greater benefits than people faking it to not wear a mask.
I’m struggling with why anyone will be incented to get vaccinated due to this guidance.
Because there is a spectrum on thought on the issue. At one end, people will wait in line for the first vaccine and still wear three masks in public. At the other end you have people who believe this is all a hoax and will get in a fist fight with a store clerk when told they have to wear a mask. We aren’t talking about either of those people.
We are talking about people who follow the guidelines, a little hesitant about getting a vaccine, wear their masks but don’t like it, but are now told it is safe not to wear a mask if you get the vaccine. Those are the people who will be incentivized by this new policy.
I think this is the first time that West Virginia has been less free than the Socialist People’s Republic of Maryland.
I look forward to the India strain hitting the US . . .surely that wouldn’t be constrained by continuing to masking up in the slightest.
But at least we can die as ‘’‘free men’’’ and not socialist slaves!
I assume that’s sarcasm. The company I work for has a lot of employees in India. It’s really not good there.
(And yet the guy in India I work most closely with is doubtful about getting the vaccine. Can’t understand it.)
Yeah, that’s the thing, like puzzlegal said, if at the same time we are not going to establish a standardized evidence of vaccination procedure, this is sort of a way to relieve the mandate without saying you are relieving the mandate, because how are we going to know?
The detail to look into there would be how many people that would incentivize to hurry up and get fully vaccinated so they can be relieved of the mandate, vs. how many it would incentivize to just lie and say, “oh, yeah, I’m good”.