Why We Still Mask
We still mask. Back in early November, we unmasked indoors for the first time since the start of COVID-19 to eat dinner at a Bat Mitzvah. We usually will go outside at a party or not eat at all, but we were in the prime vaccine booster zone and decided to take the risk because there wasn’t an outdoor space we could go, slipping back on our masks between courses.
But other than that time, we mask indoors. We mask in crowds. We go anywhere we want to go and do everything we want to do (except restaurants); we just do it in a mask.
Madeline Miller’s op-ed piece about COVID-19 is why we still mask indoors. Her long COVID stems from the pre-vaccine days, but we know too many people with long COVID symptoms who are vaccinated and boosted.
This is the part that made me say, “Me too.”
So how long am I going to do this? Until indoor air is safe for all, until vaccines prevent transmission, until there’s a cure for long covid. Until I’m not risking my family’s future on a grocery run. Because the truth is that however immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.
Thank you for saying it. And I post this because I always appreciate it when I see other people post that they also still mask.
5 comments
Exactly
Same here.
I’m not super vigilant, but indoors with a crowd? For an extended period of time? I’ve got some kind of mask. On airplanes with recycled air? N95.
Thank you. I also appreciate people who mask being open about it – masking is the one tool we actually have, and it’s baffling why people refuse to see the damage this virus is doing and refuse to mask.
Yes. We’re largely not masking anymore, but we rarely go anywhere with a crowd. And our restaurants are generally not crowded – there’s always good spacing between tables, etc. (It freaks me out in the US to sit at a table with another table about six inches away! lol … even pre-pandemic.) We definitely masked up on flights though. And there are more people wearing masks now, I’ve noticed, which is a good sign, given we’re having a surge of infections right now. You’re right – there are too many scary stories to be complacent.