ROTSHARP, mirror-ape ogre

masking is fucking amazing. up until i had to move back home with someone who has given up on masking, i went about four years without catching anything horrible, despite working retail and living in close quarters with two other people who also worked retail. it's the longest i've ever been well in my entire life. i miss it so much and i'm so angry

keep finding people who think they have 'a bad cold' and think they dont need to mask for that only for it to be covid and like. folks.

we mostly eradicated one of the major flu strains by masking.

I've gotten sick so much less since masking, and only got sick the last two years. I don't mask as much out in the open air, but inside, every time I do, and it works

I don't understand why especially traveling, people don't. Airplanes are notorious for being disease vectors, do you not want to protect yourself from that??

I feel the same way, but also I feel much more comfortable wearing a mask now that they've have been introduced as a norm (as opposed to pre-covid). When I learned that it's normal in east Asia to wear a mask when you're sick, I wished that was the case for my area overseas because going out with a mask on would definitely be unconventional and I didn't need to be more socially anxious and self conscious. Now, even if the majority of people in my area have generally stopped wearing masks, it's very normal to be seen wearing a mask, and I'm very appreciative of that cultural shift. I wish that people would be more ready to regularly wear masks when ill or out of consideration for others (myself included, sensory issues aside).

You're absolutely right — unfortunately, very few people are making strictly rational decisions about wearing masks, to a degree that feels like it's beyond even most other decisions that everyone makes throughout their daily lives.

As far as I can tell, the Not That Factually Compelling reasons, most of which relate to small inconveniences which arise literally every time one wears a mask, have more sway for most people than a long list of extremely real reasons to mask which are largely probabilistic in nature, really. (Which has been worsened by propaganda which has been extremely effective at ratcheting up the subjective inconvenience people interpret from the experience of wearing a mask while downplaying the severity and probability of known harmful outcomes from not wearing a mask.)

"this reminds me of the lockdowns", "but I can't eat while wearing this", "I don't want to spend $100 a year on masks", and "but I'm going to look like a dork wearing this when no one else does" just… …get weighed as more important than, like, a 1% risk of getting infected in any given situation × (a 5% risk of Long COVID + an effective Rt of 1.05), despite the cumulative probability of not wearing a mask having adverse outcomes being quite high, over a long enough period of time.

It's deeply annoying! But, like, when someone is largely working on the level of vibes-based reasoning, which seems to be the norm for most day-to-day decision-making for many people, that's… … …what's going to happen. 🙃

maybe this reason isn't going to sit well with people but honestly i stopped masking after being a stickler for a month or two because it just made me depressed

I mean the pandemic is still going, just the kinda people that refused to put it on in the first place have persisted so.

legitimately i think a lot of people are on the side of the virus. i think they believe people dying because of a preventable respiratory disease is good as long as it doesn't affect them personally.

I tried, but it was too hard to maintain after three years. To start with, I was spending about $40-50/month on masks, $2/each for N95s. Which I couldn't afford. The price might have gone down since last year, but that's what I was paying locally.

The experience was awful. I have sinus issues that nose clips exacerbated. I'd end up sneezing a lot (and be faced with either lifting my mask to sneeze into a tissue or sleeve or fouling my $2 mask).

My sinuses would close up and leave me mouth-breathing. Which caused my mask to get soaked with aspiration by noon (and dehydrated the hell out of me). And if I was really breathing heavy, I'd suck my mask into my mouth. I had to learn to hold my jaw a certain way to keep the mask out of my mouth, and it wasn't foolproof--I choked on one at work hauling equipment around after sucking the entire thing straps and all into my mouth.

I had constant skin problems from the wet mask rubbing on my face, the clips on my nose, and twin grooves of sores on my ears where the mask ties were pulling my ear cartilage away from my skull and rubbing constantly.

I only do it for large events, now. I know I should do it more, but daily masking is hard, expensive, and uncomfortable.

It's summer in Melbourne, and the number of people I'm hearing on transit / etc with nasty coughs is depressing. Genuinely feels like a lot of people have just settled into being sick all the time and treating it like it's normal?

I just got here, on this platform, and you're the first covid conscious person I've seen. Thank you.

it's mind blowing to me that i have to explain myself over and over again because i always wear masks in public gatherings. people legitimately talk to me like im crazy over it, while i feel like the only sound-thinking person in the room!! i bring like four masks with me everywhere i go. it's not just a health practice, as far as im concerned, it's common fucking courtesy.