To be upfront, I’m not OP of the Lemmygrad thread. Masking obviously is important and a good thing to do for your community. Personally, however, living in a place like Texas where almost nobody still masks though, 54 months (4.5 years) after the initial declaration, and everybody says COVID is relatively a non-issue like the flu, I understand why the OP would be demoralized.
クロスポスト: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5723508
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:
Do you still wear a mask or not and why? And do you have distinctions like large crowds or anything like that?
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 reuse them. I use one per for example travel and put the mask in a box on our balcony to chill out for a few days. My kid was at school at the start of this and I had this whole system of numbered weekly paper bags for him for one mask per bag and a chill out box for the ffp2 masks where we circulated them from. Afaik good masks can easily be reused for quite a while and any masking is better than none.
Edit. To answer your question I think I’ve spent maybe 100€ on masks during the entire pandemic, but then again we have dropped all unnecessary socializing for good. A box of 20 is 5,90€ and these days a box will last me for months.
Edit. 2 I do work and travel to meet clients in public transport sometimes several times/day and study at uni. I do remote work as much as I can, but there is still plenty of mask use. They still last me for months. The total cost is for a family of 3, two working adults and a kid in school.