Basically, wanted to know where people are at with mask wearing (as it relates to containing covid and all), I know it's been a while since it started. And I've seen people who say covid can still be threatening, like through long covid and such, even if the initial impact doesn't tend to be as bad. Being in the US, it's especially hard to tell what makes sense because the gov sorta gave up on containment a while back and only ever half-assed pushing mask wearing. And wearing a mask alone was a controversial thing in some places, even in the very beginning. Then there's vaccines, which of course help, but seems to be a thing like the flu where you have to get boosters to be fully covered for variant strains.
So in general, I'm wondering stuff like:
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Do you still wear a mask or not and why? And do you have distinctions like large crowds or anything like that?
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How does mask wearing compare by country, from what you know? For example, I'm sure China has a more pro-mask-wearing culture and policy overall, but I'm not clear on where they're at this late into it.
Partly asking cause I want to re-assess my own position on it, see if it makes sense to change it at all by now. I've still been doing it, in part out of inertia, but the US management of it is such a mess, in gov and culture, it's hard to tell when it makes sense to stop vs. just caving to peer pressure of people who were never acting responsibly to begin with.
I do whenever I can, in my work I can't, because it's socially so frowned upon here. I try to work alone/remote as much as I can becaude of this and bought and aur purifier for my office, I have high risk loved ones, have longcovid and so does people closest to me. I'd rather mask everywhere, did not miss the smells of other peoples sweat at all.
In my country (Finland) masking was negatively framed from day one. Also it was strongly hinted that they don't work, there's nothing we can do and the frail will fall regardless.
There have been no masks used here for most of the time I masked everywhere, the mask wearing only happened for the delta wave, but when the vaccinations began, they disappeared. "Expert" opinion has been very anti-mask and covid has been "just a cold" that only kills old people all along.
This whole thing has been my single biggest eye-opener to the fucked up fascist values I have actually grown up surrounded by. It has also made me understand that covid and covid protection is 100% a working class issue and a matter of class consciousness. It's the workers like me who don't get protected that die from it or get longcovid. Also lots of eugenist brainworms in my country.
This is a country where unironically one popular saying is "there's still room behind the sauna" and this is supposedly a joke about how the undesirables used to be shot behind a sauna in our fash past and gets thrown around whenever someone for example does something dumb. We are the baddies actually and covid made me see this in its entirety, because the society I live in is behaving like monsters without even realizing it.