Every time I want to forget COVID, my partner has another bi-weekly breathing crisis that’s been going on since her infection in 2022. My best friend has been out of work since she last got Covid in 2020.

People that give me shit about masking are the grossest boomer reactionaries that I know, and I revel that I piss those knobheads off. Granted my situation is maybe easier than most, I’m white, tall, old, and have professional credentials. I think it’s probably harder to fuck with me than a lot of other people.

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.

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.

This community might be of interest as they still talk about it a lot there: !covid@hexbear.net

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 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.

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.

1. I do whenever I can, in my work I can’t, because it’s socially so frowned upon here. I try to work alone/remote as much as I can becaude of this and bought and aur purifier for my office, I have high risk loved ones, have longcovid and so does people closest to me. I’d rather mask everywhere, did not miss the smells of other peoples sweat at all.

2. In my country (Finland) masking was negatively framed from day one. Also it was strongly hinted that they don’t work, there’s nothing we can do and the frail will fall regardless.

There have been no masks used here for most of the time I masked everywhere, the mask wearing only happened for the delta wave, but when the vaccinations began, they disappeared. “Expert” opinion has been very anti-mask and covid has been “just a cold” that only kills old people all along.

This whole thing has been my single biggest eye-opener to the fucked up fascist values I have actually grown up surrounded by. It has also made me understand that covid and covid protection is 100% a working class issue and a matter of class consciousness. It’s the workers like me who don’t get protected that die from it or get longcovid. Also lots of eugenist brainworms in my country.

This is a country where unironically one popular saying is “there’s still room behind the sauna” and this is supposedly a joke about how the undesirables used to be shot behind a sauna in our fash past and gets thrown around whenever someone for example does something dumb. We are the baddies actually and covid made me see this in its entirety, because the society I live in is behaving like monsters without even realizing it.

I want to preface what im about to say by saying i do wear a mask, and think everyone should.

I think that the focus on masking was a misdirect similar to how the powerful will push personal responsibility about the climate to combat systemic issues. While yes masking is effective and important it means we are relying on the lowest common denominator of dumbasses to do the right thing. Which never works out well.

I think that a much better solution would be to have buildings like stores where large crowds gather indoors with air filtration systems, and UV overhead sanitation lighting. Especially at entrances and exits. Its been proven such measures make a big difference. You could easily incorporate UV lighting into normal light fixtures and effectively sanitize every surface in a building constantly. Air filtration is already in most buildings AC systems and could be retrofitted to filter for viral bodies. Most people would not even notice these things happening. People should still be encouraged to mask especially when they are sick, but solutions that do not rely on an individual doing the proper thing are much more reliable.

The reason they don’t get pushed is that they cost money, and companies and governments do not want to do them. But when Biden was going to campaign events they brought portable air filters to keep the air in the buildings he was in clean so they are clearly aware of these solutions.

Also in this same vein vaccines during the height of covid were made free for those without insurance but i do not think that is the case anymore. Vaccination combined with those other solutions even without proper masking would massively reduce spread, and the fact it hasnt been done is simply a systemic issue.

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.

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you have to get boosters to be fully covered for variant strains.

Speaking of boosters, friendly reminder that at least in the US, 2024 updated Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been out for a few weeks. If you haven’t already, look into getting your updated booster soon :)

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I mask every day; I will stop masking and taking precautions the moment the pandemic is over. I will not risk disability or death for myself or anybody in my life for the acceptance of those who deny science or for the mild convenience of not putting on a mask

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Never stopped masking in clinics. In the last few months I am back to masking in crowded environments. Always wear KN-95 or equivalent quality mask. I don’t live in a high density or high population area.

Wore a mask to the theatre last night, and within ten minutes the stranger next to me started coughing and continued to do so throughout the film.

As far as I know, I have never gotten covid and I plan to keep it that way.