I'll preface this by saying I live in Scotland, so we've been doing the face masks in shops thing for a while longer than in the rest of the UK, so people have had more time to get used to/get bored of the idea.
I go to shops most days. I can't get everything I need from one store and I like to go out walking whenever I can (I WFH), so I tend to visit the PO with eBay things to post and/or pick up some groceries on the way home. I'm obviously limited in what I can carry but it suits me getting a bit in every day.
About a week ago I began to notice a distinct absence of face masks in shops. First it was the woman in front of me at the PO. I figured she was probably exempt so I didn't think anything of it. You can't really go challenging anyone as they might be and then it would be embarrassing if they were exempt and it's not really my place to do so. I'm not the mask police.On the way out I noticed another guy at the till (it's a grocery store) not wearing a mask.
Next I went to ASDA. There were a whole gaggle of people one aisle looking at toothpaste and they weren't wearing masks. At this point it occurred to me that none of the people wandering around the store were under 11 and there seemed to be an awful lot of people with asthma or anxiety conditions in my community. More so than I had realised. As I wandered around I began to become aware that it was just me and the occasional old person bothering to mask up. It doesn't help that the staff don't have to. At this point I began to seriously wonder if there had been a government announcement I had missed.
The following day I went back to the PO and apart from some old guy buying milk no-one else in the store was wearing mask. A large number of blokes were in buying beer from the off licence. No masks there either.
Is it me? Am I going mad? There seems to be this general belief that Coronavirus is a myth, that everyone is fussing about nothing because hardly anybody dies of it and the government rules are ridiculous and contradictory so why bother. And no-one is enforcing it. And yet everywhere I go people are flogging masks. Shops aren't bothering controlling the number of people going in and out, the one-way systems have gone, there's no attempt at social distancing anywhere. If I didn't know better I would think the past few months had been a dream.
Either we all do it or we don't bother. Otherwise all these rules and regulations which must be costing massive amounts of money are just a complete waste of time. When are Nicola and Boris going to wake up to the fact that people, having gotten bored of Coronavirus, have apparently moved on?