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 always wear a mask when sharing breath outside my household. That means everywhere inside. That means outsids if I'm near people. Even if it's just one person -- it only takes one oerson to spread disease. Covid is airborne and has killed and disabled millions. The vaccines lessen the chance of death in the acute phase but don't prevent Long Covid and I'm not willing to get Long Covid.
Covid is a class issue. The capitalists got pissed that keeping people safe from covid was too expensive and disruptive to business as normal so they sent the working class into the meat grinder and have manufactured the myth that it's over. All for their economy. Its not over and all the young people I see coming down with POTS, cognitive decline, and chronic fatigue are a testament to that fact.
Wear a respirator anytime you have to breathe in someone's exhalations -- kf94, kn95, n95, or better (kf99, kn100, p100). It should seal on your face, not have giant gaps. You can get body-safe double-sided tape called "mask tape" to affix a disposable respirator to your face. It's a bit more upfront effort and cost but you can get a resuable elastomeric respirator -- my P100 cost 30 to 40 dollars and the filters last for 3-4 months before they need replacing, at $15 per replacement set.
Never give in. Those who pressure you won't take care of you if you become disabled from Covid. They won't even care enough to spit on your grave if you die from it directly, or die from the disability and systemic oppression that is rained down upon those who cannot work. They won't spit on your grave because that would require remembering and acknowledging what they did to you and they'd rather sleepwalk to their own joyful doom with no acknowledgement of the cost in human blood to disrupt their shared mass delusion.
So much of my journey from being a liberal to a communist was figuring out that my middle-class (and middle-class aspirational) friends would drop me in an instant the second my life faced the tiniest of difficulties.
It's pure fantasy to imagine that any of my old family or friends, short of possibly two people, would give a fuck about me as a disabled person.
Absolutely. These people don't understand what a "friend" is -- at most they're friendly acquaintances