Comradeship // Freechat

I wear a mask ~10 hours a day at work. When I was doing more laborious work I didn't though due to sweat and fit.

Imo the bare minimum should be masking for all short interactions. I understand not wanting to wear a mask all day at work, but it sacrifices very little to wear one for 30 minutes at the store or wherever.

I just switched from auras to a flomask. More comfortable, but still working out the seal.

But even without covid, there's other diseases and cameras everywhere. I'm happy that masking is more normalized (to the degree that it is. Still had people get very angry at me)

Hey all you saying you don’t mask anymore: thanks for contributing to the deaths of millions of people like me, a disabled person who doesn’t get a choice. Hope it’s worth it. Fuck you.

I stopped a while ago, I hate that I did, but I can't stop a widespread pandemic on my own and it feels pointless now after all these years of nobody else giving a shit, being the only person in a crowd who ever masks for years feels so demoralizing and I just couldn't keep doing it

What's even the point if my family doesn't mask anyway? Even from the very start, they would always do as much as possible to avoid wearing them, and two months ago I caught COVID from them and I think it's left me with Long COVID, even masking in public wouldn't have done anything about it

Like it's not like I'm going out in public while actively having COVID, but masking at all times just isn't working for me anymore

No personal choice on my part could ever come close to making up for the systemic collapse of disease control that was deliberately engineered by the most powerful people in the world

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.

I wear masks everywhere I share air with people and request anyone that enters my home does the same. there's social pressure everywhere to not wear them, but I'd rather deal with social pressure than risk getting covid. it's a threat to any part of your body that uses blood and thus worth tremendous effort to avoid where practicable.

Masks and respirators for prevention of respiratory infections: a state of the science review

You may find this useful as an in-depth look on the topic of masking. It's pretty long, but I think worth the read.

I do still mask every time I leave my apartment. There's essentially no reason not to in my opinion. It would obviously be much safer if everyone was still masking, but at least in my experience, diligent masking has been very effective at preventing illness in my household despite the lack of precaution from the public. People can be kind of weird about it sometimes, but it's mostly limited to staring and the occasional rude statement, which as a trans woman is something I was used to before the pandemic anyways lol. I do worry sometimes about the chance of someone getting violent with me or my wife, but also if the alternative is giving up the mask and destroying our health, and maybe even killing her if we get unlucky, just to please ableist assholes, well, the choice is obvious to me.

I wish I knew more about the masking culture of other countries. All I can say with certainty is that in my community (A large city in the US), nobody gives a fuck about public health at all, and largely refuse to change their lifestyle in any way to help themselves, much less anyone else. Unmasked people outweigh masked people by an enormous amount, and the few maskers are often wearing surgical masks or other insufficient PPE, and I frequently see people still wearing them beneath their nose or taking them off in public. Many people I talk to are well aware that Covid is still around and is destroying everyone's health, but they either seem to think it doesn't affect them, or prefer to live in a lie and ignore it.

Rarely if ever now. Nobody else does it here, and I feel uncomfortable (both a tiny bit physically, but moreso socially) when I wear it as such. Like I'm reminding people of it honestly- and as a visible minority (Asian) that adds to it.

Admittedly also- the effort isn't worth it, not for the society-at-large here (which has abandoned masks, but which also is a Anglo settler-hellhole country I feel considerably alienated from at this point for many reasons). If the rest of society here wants to let it all burn down- well, I have those I care about and would try to help decent people- but I say let it burn. Not like I see things feasibly changing for the better here in the imperial cores anytime soon, so honestly the world would probably be a better place without this country (whether it be the govt. or the settler-mentality culture). Letting it burn will be progress one way or another, either positive change can come of it or the beast of empire can continue its spiral straight to hell, far be it from me to stop it from doing so. The west's loss is the rest of the world's, and humanity's, win (not because it's inherently so, but because the imperialist mentality and regimes make it so), that's just how it is right now and how it has been for the past 500 years, I suppose.

Yes I wear a mask when I’m indoors away of my home. I do this for the safety of myself, my family, and others. And you should too. And you should be advocating for others to do the same if they can.

A better world is possible. One where we treat communicable illnesses as something to mitigate/eradicate. It is morally right to protect others, the indigent, the youth, the imfirmed, the vulnerable. Wearing a mask indoors while away from your home when there is an ongoing pandemic, one that causes systematic harm to the body and immune system, is the least you can do. Each COVID infection is a roll of the dice. It’s a chance for mutation in a disease that is known for mutation. If you feel personally inconvenienced by a mask then you should reconsider a lot of things. Accepting disease as simply part of life is uninformed. It denies that we live in a global, interconnected community. It is as fatalistic as accepting the unending supremacy of capital. That myopic view has no place in class consciousness. The pandemic is without question the fault of the owner class. They rely on our complacency, accepting preventable death whether by war, climate, or disease.

It's basically not a thing in my area, so I feel like it's a constant social struggle. I mostly don't, now. I will to the grocery store, or to places the people I live with won't be. I don't feel like my actions are meaningful, if I'm going to be exposed to their germs from school either way. I would traveling, though.

I'm weaker than I'd like to be.

Of course not, it was torture when we had to, if they gave us plague masks to wear instead, then it would have been a different story.

I don't mask, but that's largely because the state I live in here in the US is overwhelmingly non-mask. If there were even, idk, a few businesses in the area that did it, I might - but there's not. Me wearing a mask around when nobody else is feels more like virtue signaling than anything. Damn near nobody else is wearing them, so few in fact that I can count the times I've seen them in the past year on one hand. If the idea is to wear the mask to reduce to spread, then it doesn't make any sense because the overwhelming majority aren't doing it.

But your situation is likely different. Perhaps you live in a more sensible state, where politely asking someone to mask isn't met with a tirade about how masks are Nazism.

This community might be of interest as they still talk about it a lot there: [email protected]

I still wear a mask. I wouldn't necessarily wear one or keep one on if I was walking around a lightly populated park or down the sidewalk but I would before going into a store or a crowd (even outdoors) or any enclosed space with people like a train or station.

I'm not sure how mask wearing compares by country. In most of Asia it seems like it's been normalized for decades for people who are feeling ill or have certain conditions to wear the blue cloth medical masks so I doubt in most of Asia it's a big deal in most situations compared to the west where you have anti-mask reactionary sentiment and ideology that favors individual recklessness rather than responsibility.

I don't mask at work (yanking it down to drink water over and over and over is irritating, but even worse is how fucking hot it gets when doing physical labor) but I think I'll always mask in public spaces from now on.