Yeah, it’s just a really shitty endgame.
IDK, it sucks, guess we get to all decide how complicit we want to be in a society that kills off a few hundred thousand of its old and vulnerable every year.
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I think we all know what the behavioural answer to that will be (if not the verbal).
Please do not turn this thread into a pit of chaos today. Lay off the personal attacks. Keep the discussion civil and relevant to current day COVID. If you feel the need to rehash old feelings then do it in a PM. Thanks.
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Getting vaccinated is both less burdensome and more effective at curtailing the pandemic than wearing a mask for all interpersonal contact.
Dude, I’m fully vaxxed + boosted but still need a negative COVID test to enter the country that I was born and raised in. So probably for a long-ass time.
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Slow mode engage. Im working and dont have time to do anything else. Knock it off
I see Tilted posted above. Heed his suggestion
Not that it’s an unbearable burden, and I’ll keep wearing them. But masks suck worse for some than others. I can take 15 minutes before I start to get pretty uncomfortable.
I’m a big fat guy who sucks in a ton of oxygen (based on my scuba experiences). My face is always the first place I start sweating. My goggles were always fogged over and filled with sweat in chem class. I had a job for about an hour that required an N-95. I couldn’t do it. The mask was literally full of sweat.
If I have to exert myself in a mask, I get a very unenjoyable hot, claustrophobic feeling like I can’t suck enough air. The worst is getting on the plane right after the hustle of the airport. Then it gets easier as my heart rate slows down.
I tried some cloth masks but they apparently aren’t that effective, and they gross me out for some reason. I want a fresh paper mask.
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Man, COVID sucks.
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I wear mine for about 4 hours a day at work and usually it’s fine but occasionally I’ll get this and for a brief second I sympathize with the “I can’t breathe in a mask!” people and then I calm down or whatever and can breathe fine again.
Sigh. Any more off topic posts get a break. This is a blanket warning to everyone.
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Proper mask wearing means no dining out, no getting a drink after work with your buds, no eating popcorn in a movie theater, and having a soggy napkin on your face at the gym. Proper mask wearing is making our society increasingly impersonal. It is absolutely burdensome, especially when we’re talking about doing it for years and years for everything and not just one or two trips to the grocery store. And what even is a manageable level? You seemed pretty frustrated with vaccinated people not masking up back in May, when it wasn’t uncommon to have daily new cases in the single digits per hundred thousand people level in any given county, pre-delta. I’m not sure we’re ever going to get down to that level again, at least not until we have abundant worldwide vaccination of all ages and enough time for this to burn through literally everyone else, and then maybe? Doesn’t seem likely in 2022.
So, no, it should not be the least bit surprising that people who’ve done the single biggest thing they can do to protect themselves, their families, and those around them want to engage in cross-cultural, timeless, simple pleasures like dining out with friends, sampling food at the market, etc. To expect everyone to abstain from all of this with no end in sight in no small part due to and on behalf of people who are willfully foregoing such precautions is an enormous request, not one equivalent to the burden of wearing a mask once, or even to wearing a mask N times.
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I dont think we are just doing it just for or because the unvaxxed. My biggest fear from a personal safety standpoint is going back to March 2020 from an evasive variant and we are working hard to make that possibility a reality.
The rest of your post are feelings I sympathize with. Id really like to see a massive government roll-out and normalization of rapid testing before these kind of events. It isnt 100% safe to be in a movie theatre with everyone vaccinated and rapid tested, but seems like if we got community cases reasonably low that it would be a reasonable balance between living life and public health.
Longer-term it should go hand-in-hand with better ventilation requirements.
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All of the rules in Toronto are half measures of this. You wear a mask to your table but eat with no mask on. Same for drinks or eating in a forum like a theater, or even a transit system. Gyms don’t require you to have a mask on while exercising.
I dont think there are any stricter rules anywhere in the US at this point. We are local mask mandates in the places I spend most of my time, and compliance is near 100%, but indoor dining fully open and de facto no mask, can always have a get out of mask free care with a drink in your hand, etc. Gyms I think require masks all the time though.
You said masking until manageable levels of covid. I don’t know what that means specifically, but it would seem, based on your posting history, to be something well below May levels, which, to me, were pretty low. I also don’t think you hold a position like what mosdef just outlined, that masking when you walk into a restaurant is necessary but there’s no issue when taking it off to eat for an hour and a half cooped up indoors with other unmasked diners. That’s a political compromise, not a scientifically sound position. It would seem that someone frustrated with Riverman would be frustrated with just about anyone doing any indoor activity with others unmasked until cases were much, much lower than they are now, perhaps to a level that I’m not sure we’ll see again for at least the next year. If that’s wrong, then what criteria would have to be met for Riverman to not to draw your accusation of hypocrisy?
My experience with masks on transit is that usage is high, 90%+ of everyone chilling in their seats.