I will say as a follow-up to that last post, that at this point in the total breakdown of public health infrastructure I am no longer really weighing morals into how I assess other people masking or not. Maybe this is just to keep myself sane because if I considered every single unmasked person to be someone who doesn't care if I live or die then I would be crushed underneath the grief and isolation. When such a small minority of people are still taking COVID precautions, "preventing community spread" is no longer really being achieved by one singular person taking extra precautions or not, at least not in a morally significant manner. To me, it becomes equivalent to how one person drinking plastic bottled water or not is not what is causing climate change even though it is indeed marginally better for the environment if that individual had used a reusable water bottle instead.
COVID precautions such as masking, at this point, truly can only be considered as measures for your protecting your own individual health and the health of specific individuals who you are in regular intimate contact with such as family members, people you live with, close friends, etc. who are also themselves taking those same precautions. I'm really not protecting the health of my coworkers, library patrons, etc. if those people are not taking the same protective measures I am, and I am not making a significant difference in reducing the airborne COVID circulation rate at my workplace if I'm the only person wearing a mask.
I think that taking this attitude is partially why I've never had anybody call me a "mask scold" or anything like that and people do tend to be more accepting of me taking my precautions. When collective health precautions still existed, it truly was a matter of collective health for everyone to work together to reduce spread by taking the some precautions. The one person unmasking was making a huge safety difference in a harmful manner. At this point, the situation is totally inverted. Americans only understand individual risk assessment and "protecting you and your own." It's a disgusting way to approach something where everyone is as intertwined as a pandemic, and totally doesn't work to actually solve the problem, but it's how everyone in this country thinks, even the people who are otherwise left leaning on political issues. So while internally I do wish we were all taking collective precautions, externally I have to behave as though it's an individual decision because that's the culture we live in and when that's how everyone is acting, it ends up being an individual decision.
I think a part of this is also that I still have a lot of trauma from being an untouchable essential worker back in 2020. I remember going to work in a face shield and way-too-tight KN95s that I disposed of daily and doing everything I possibly could to keep myself safe and still nobody being willing to see me as anything but inherently diseased and dangerous while they all went camping with their "bubbles." It's just not emotionally, financially, or logistically practical for me to take all of the precautions that people online say I should take. I'm not going to wear an elastomeric mask. I'm not going to use a nasal spray. I'm going to wear the Good Mask Co KN95s that fit my face comfortably and I can tolerate wearing for ten hours a day five or six days a week and I'm going to replace them once a week even though they probably lose their effectiveness sooner than that. It's the level of precaution taking I can tolerate when it comes to what I do at work. No matter how much more safe I try to be, I'm still going to be socially isolated from the people who dont take precautions and from the people who take more precautions and I'm still gonna be avoiding restaurants and hibernating through the winter. So I just need to make an individual decision for how much risk I can tolerate versus my comfort working full time.
So if I'm already making compromises, then it's hard for me to draw a firm line on where someone is just being less safe than me but is still like, a moral person, versus when they become a bad person who doesn't care about disabled people. Each individual masking is just a drop removed from an ocean of viral spread when you're someone who works full time in public service. I can't have this conflict and resentment with 95% of people I interact with day to when when I know that for most of them they truly are just ignorant.
I have to lay the blame at the feet of the government and news media, in the same way I would for other bad things people do for systemic reasons.
this is actually why I stopped masking. I take exposure seriously, keep tests on hand and isolate immediately, but when I noticed the masking rate around me had dropped below 5% it just became too goddamn depressing. I'm not protecting anyone else in public spaces, not a vector to anyone vulnerable at home, and shitty as it may be the eye-rolling when I do mask is mental stress I don't have the spoons for (as evidenced by the danger to myself not being in the calculation, due not to ignorance but resignation)
