Annoyed that masks can be a way that people are judged

[Twattergy]

I went to a hairdresser today. All staff wearing masks. I asked on entry ' do you require me to wear a mask?' and receptionist said 'no we can't force you to, it's up to you'. So I didn't put one on. I had one with me, but now it isn't mandatory, I made my choice based on fact that I have been tripled jabbed and recovered from covid 2 weeks ago. I kept having the urge to tell the staff 'I have been tripled jabbed and recently recovered from covid which is the main reason I'm not wearing a mask'..but I thought why should I have to justify this? Any of the masked people in there could be unvaccinated, or even knowingly have symptoms of Covid, but because they are wearing a mask it is assumed they are doing 'the right thing'. And me in no mask, I think many people would assume I'm being anti social, when in fact I have been highly responsible with vaccination. I'm annoyed at the huge potential for judgements around mask wearing now that it isn't mandatory. (I would wear a mask where is is mandatory eg London transport or health care settings BTW I'm not a radical anti masker). Ifnyou were sat next to me in the hairdresser would you judge me? Would you want me to tell you I was fully vaxxed and recently recovered?

Or because you tell them they’re racist.

Where did I do that? I wrote about the views of a particular Asian doctor, who feels that racism plays a role. Like I said, I don't know whether she's right or not.

The one area I really think you have a point, though, is very little ones whose main experiences of strangers are as half-faces.

This is one of the things the Japanese-American doctor referred to. She found it offensive that people appeared to be suggesting Japanese children (who are well used to wearing masks at times) were somehow 'damaged'. She also noted the general high educational standards and achievements in Japan (as in the masks don't affect the childrens development).

Oops, took so long writing that, debates moved on. Will aim to catch up tomorrow. :)

The links I posted explain "what this would achieve" in some detail

I think you’ve perhaps misread me, then. My point is: what would slowing transmissions achieve, exactly, for a very common endemic virus in a post-vaccine world? Almost would still be exposed to the virus, repeatedly, as we are with the other common human coronaviruses. Slowing transmission to buy time for vaccination or to lighten intense hospital load makes sense. Slowing transmission so your first infection happens in May rather than April achieves… what?

As for what The Experts say: I feel that when real-world conditions don’t support a papers conclusions, the paper is more likely to be missing something than the world is. Even if it’s that something which works in a subset of a population doesn’t work in a whole population, for example. Continuing to claim that masks do reduce community transmission when we’re living in a country where they clearly haven’t sounds a bit “well it works in theory, so it doesn’t matter if it works in practice.”

the strawman suggesting I want masks forever.

If you don’t want masks forever then you, like me, accept that there is some point at which masks shouldn’t be required (by law or social convention) while coronavirus is still circulating. You might have different criteria than mine for when it’s reasonable to lift that expectation, but then it’s a matter of degree, surely - far from a different ideological stance.

I don’t think many people explicitly want masks forever. But, there are a number of people who want masks “just for now, not forever” but can’t or won’t set out the milestone they think we’d need to pass in order to get to a point of no masks. And if ‘largely everyone who wants it has been vaccinated and hospitals aren’t in danger of being overwhelmed’ isn’t enough, you do start to wonder what would be.

(I suspect for many people it’s more subjective - “when I feel like they aren’t really warranted any more, but I don’t yet know what combination of things will make me feel that way.” Which is fine for someone’s own personal approach, but is not really very convincing when it comes to something they think others should be expected to do.)

Maybe anecdotal but I’m currently half way through the six episodes of ‘James May, our man in Japan’ which was filmed in 2019 and evidence of people wearing face masks are very, very few and far between. Apart from one person in a cat cafe the very small number seen were all outside, so would suggest through a concern over pollution.

@Tealightsandd

The one area I really think you have a point, though, is very little ones whose main experiences of strangers are as half-faces.

This is one of the things the Japanese-American doctor referred to. She found it offensive that people appeared to be suggesting Japanese children (who are well used to wearing masks at times) were somehow 'damaged'. She also noted the general high educational standards and achievements in Japan (as in the masks don't affect the childrens development).

But in Japan, pre-pandemic, people didn’t wear masks in the way that mask laws here have mandated. It was not common practice for everyone to wear masks in indoor public places, for teachers and kids to all be masked as routine in schools, etc. So it isn’t really a reasonable comparison to say “it was fine in Japan all these years so why can’t people here cope?”

Oh, heck. Should be going to bed, but...

Very interesting about the Japanese American doc, Tealightsandd. That's been my thinking. I CAN imagine very littluns indeed, who are living through fully masked days at school for months on end and then seeing them in the shops & on the train as well, as potentially developing issues, and this worries me... but these more generalised concerns that the limited use of masks in certain, targetted contexts somehow diminish society & human interaction seem very strange in the light of other countries' attitudes to & comfortable use of them as, in fact, key building blocks in very caring & responsible societies!

Sigh.

I wouldn’t have judged you but I would have sat as far away from you as possible.

I'd have judged you twice...

1. for not wearing a mask and
2. for making a big deal out of it and making the staff extra uncomfortable.

The 'choice' has meant that people can choose to unleash their selfishness and demonstrate utter contempt for others.

I'd be embarrassed to be in a shop without a mask at the moment, but hate wearing them.

GoldenOmber, thanks for replying. My response is pretty much the same as I've said before.

Maybe I've misunderstood you, but comments like "real-world conditions don’t support [research-based] conclusions" & "continuing to claim that masks do reduce community transmission when we’re living in a country where they clearly haven’t" are honestly rather naive. A layperson's real-world observations simply can't outweigh informed expert research into the very same things that layperson's casually observing. OK, science is a continual process of revision, discovery, evolving understanding, messy conflict & eventual consensus - consensus that may, even then, be revised. But it matters. If our post-modern post-truth era really is leading people to believe, in all earnestness, that uninformed individual assertion outweighs this process, that leaves me more worried about the future of society than any mask-wearing ever could!

You're right that I can't set out a milestone. I think my view that it's not possible to do this at this stage is pretty compatible with my focus on working with what we know at any one point & recognising my own total ignorance of all this stuff. Besides the obvious variables of transmission rates / new variants / vaccination expiration etc. that no one can begin to predict accurately, there's an infinity of other factors to consider - NHS numbers, social attitudes, political expediencies. To give a definitive date or reduce such a complex situation to a concrete set of numbers or conditions must be a nightmare for experts, never mind little me. But to mistake any resistance to doing this with a desire for masks for evermore or an admission someone'll never change their views is another strawman.

Again, everything I'm arguing basically comes down to recognising what we know AND accepting what we don't. It's bloody scary to have to do this, but to pretend anything else would be like Johnson's self-interested "I made all the right call on the important stuff" AKA "I was bloody lucky retrospectively speaking", or whatever it was.

Gah, this is addictive.

Night, all.

Goodnight @Metacat (and the rest of you).

As posted a few times on here the pandemic response was to stop the health service being overwhelmed when that passes then we revert to more choice

I think that is important

I do follow people’s leads eg we’re all still wearing masks to nursery drop off despite being outside but because it’s a sign we care about the staff who are also wearing ons (I do it for this reason anyway)

But I prefer people to be free from judgement by others and really don’t mind what others do

I’d also always choose my hairdresser who doesn’t indicate anyone should wear one over another that does - no one is wearing one so no upset

I don't blame people for saying I'm done with covid etc but it's still here and doesn't seem to be going away yet!

But it will be here forever and isn't going anywhere, so at some point we have to treat it as other diseases like flu. Those that want to keep mitigations in place are free to assess their own level of risk and act accordingly.

"But it will be here forever and isn't going anywhere, so at some point we have to treat it as other diseases like flu. Those that want to keep mitigations in place are free to assess their own level of risk and act accordingly."

@Wizzbangfizz yes, I agree with you, but that means that the people at the hairdressers are free to wear masks and the OP is free not to wear one, but she needs to stop judging the mask wearers just because she's confident to go without ( nor should they judge her) . Did anyone glare or move away from her?
Just because she's moved on in her mind she can't know the mindset of others.
I'm immunocompromised, about to have my second booster and do risk assessment daily .
I'm not bothered by the OP and she shouldn't be bothered by me.

@Cocogreen

"But it will be here forever and isn't going anywhere, so at some point we have to treat it as other diseases like flu. Those that want to keep mitigations in place are free to assess their own level of risk and act accordingly."

@Wizzbangfizz yes, I agree with you, but that means that the people at the hairdressers are free to wear masks and the OP is free not to wear one, but she needs to stop judging the mask wearers just because she's confident to go without ( nor should they judge her) . Did anyone glare or move away from her?
Just because she's moved on in her mind she can't know the mindset of others.
I'm immunocompromised, about to have my second booster and do risk assessment daily .
I'm not bothered by the OP and she shouldn't be bothered by me.

I’m all for this and have been for a while

Omicron stuffed it up a bit but the quicker we move to choice and no judgement either way the better.

I wouldn't judge your for not wearing a mask, same as I wouldn't judge anybody for wearing a mask. It's a choice. Luckily we live in a society where we have freedom and choice.

A lot on herebwould love for us to lose test freedom and just do as they say/see

A layperson's real-world observations simply can't outweigh informed expert research into the very same things that layperson's casually observing.

Paying attention to what actually happens in real-world conditions is also part of science. For a different example - this is why Pfizer struck a deal with Israel for early bulk access to their vaccine, in exchange for seeing what it actually did in a population of millions and whether their extrapolations from Phase 3 trials would hold up. (And thankfully for all of us, yes they did.)

You’ll notice I used the term ‘quasi-experiment’ above. That isn’t something I’ve made up as a silly naive layperson, that’s an actual term used when looking at how you can draw empirical observations from real-world situations that weren’t designed as an experiment on the same lines as an RCT.

But to mistake any resistance to doing this with a desire for masks for evermore or an admission someone'll never change their views is another strawman.

Then you’re as I described earlier - of the view that there exists some set of conditions that will make you happy for everyone to drop masks, but taking a subjective approach to what these are (‘I’ll know it when I see it’).

Again, this is fine for you making your own judgement call, but not really a compelling argument for others, as what you would effectively be asking them to do is cast aside the criteria they’ve decided on and wait for your word on when you personally and subjectively feel like it’s appropriate.

And while you feel it’s a strawman for anyone to accuse you of wanting masks forever - if nothing that’s materially changed so far (vaccines, hospital loads, omicron, whatever else) has met your criteria for lifting them, and you can’t even put into words what other sort of material changes might achieve this, you can see why people might ask what the difference is between that and wanting masks forever? “Not forever, just until an unreachable set of conditions I can’t specify”?

If you are triple vaccinated then I honestly wouldn't care what anybody else thinks. Their opinion is meaningless. It's your body, you can do whatever you want.

Swiss cheese.

Those who talk about this how would you explain case numbers. I think we have the lowest amount of layers in terms of restrictions atm and other countries use masks more

This is why I haven't been to the hairdresser since March 2020. I don't want to spend 3 hours (cut + colour) wearing a mask but I don't want to be judged for not wearing one (when it's been legal) either. So I colour my hair myself and the DC's barber has given me a haircut which was fine (he's a qualified hairdresser too).

Here’s what I’m talking about by saying that different rules around mask-wearing didn’t noticeably reduce transmission in the time the UK countries idly diverged. England dropped masks just after the start of this graph, the other nations didn’t.

Now it’s possible there are other factors causing higher rates in the other 3 to compensate for some transmission-reducing effect there, of course - but the most compelling explanation I’ve ever heard is lower rates of population immunity due to harsher NPIs previously, which even if it’s true would suggest that the best you can do is delay things by 6 months or so.

A layperson's real-world observations simply can't outweigh informed expert research into the very same things that layperson's casually observing.

Indeed, I’ve done the same myself. I now realise that when the daily reported figures are falling I should wait for an expert to tell me that the daily reported figures are falling before I see that the daily reported figures are falling.

@GoldenOmber, thanks & apologies I wasn’t clear on quasi experiments; living & learning! - could you post a link to the write-up of the one you mention, or anywhere the results were reported if easier?

@GoldenOmber

It really isn't a bother for most of us to wear a mask. Only a minority are genuinely unable to wear them.

You can keep repeating ‘it really isn’t a bother’, but people for whom it IS a bother aren’t suddenly going to cast aside all our own experiences just because they don’t align with yours, I’m afraid. Or because you tell them they’re racist.

Exactly. For plenty of us wearing a mask really is a bother. They make my anxiety spike hugely and I’ve never got used to them. As a result I avoid going anywhere indoors for an extended period of time. My world has got much smaller because of masks. Even seeing everyone else wearing masks massively increases my anxiety. I know there are plenty of others out there that have the same issue.