why we didn't wear masks

[mindstalk]

An anti-masker question I've been seeing going around Twitter is "did you wear masks before 2020?" Implying that if they're a good idea now even with covid vaccines, they would have been a good idea then against cold and flu, and if we didn't wear them, we're inconsistent or irrationally afraid.

Well no, I didn't wear masks, nor any American I knew. But it's not because we considered masks and made a decision not to wear them. It's because we never considered them at all. We didn't reject it as an option, we didn't even have it as an option.

I have a bit less excuse than most: I did know that the Japanese would wear masks when sick. But even so, when I flew from Seattle in Feb 2020 with my last cold, it never occurred to me that wearing a mask was something I could do. If someone had brought it up, probably I would have wondered where I could even find a mask, especially on short notice. If someone had handed me one and suggested I wear it on the plane to be courteous to others, quite likely I would have worn it! But without that, it wasn't even on the mental menu.

Likewise, when I was suffering through various years of hay fever, "buy masks and wear them against pollen" never occurred to me. No choice was made, it just was.

Now, though? Now I do have multiple masks -- respirators -- that are comfortable and should filter at least 90% of particles. (The material itself should be better than 99%, the uncertainty is about fit.) I'm used to wearing them. I also now know that some Californian friends *did* have N95s, for protection against wildfire smoke. I can envision using masks as protection against pollen and PM2.5 pollution. Now I'd say "if I'm on a plane and sick, why *wouldn't* I wear a mask? Or if someone on the plane is coughing behind me? If I'm walking along a busy road, why wouldn't I want to cut the particulates I'm breathing by at least 90%? Why were we so tolerant of breathing filthy air?"

Comments

[mtbc]

Colds and even 'flu aren't much of a health risk to me. Maybe when I'm old or something, but not now. Worst that happens is I'm laid up in bed feeling like crap for a few days and it's not like I would go visit hypothetical grandparents in that case.

COVID-19? Those complications could be really bad, and we still mostly don't yet know, even how reliably one's body may wholly purge itself of it, I've no wish to roll that die. That's why the filtering mask is now worth it to me.

[mindstalk]

That's also a big part of it, of course, particularly why I'm carefully wearing respirators now.

But for me at least, I didn't wear masks to contain my own colds simply because I never thought of that as a real option.

[mindstalk]

Likewise, some Asian countries picked up masking because of SARS/MERS, but kept it afterwards for less urgent things. Just as Japan started with the 1918 flu pandemic, then kept it for reasons as trivial as getting out of doing makeup.

[contrarianarchon]

What about "I considered the matter but decided it would be too logistically complicated and I'd suffer social consequences, etc, for it"? Me and almost certainly other people are there.

[mindstalk]

Also valid! And it's possible that at some point I dismissed masks as "just too weird for the US", I don't recall, though I think "where would I get masks" and just not thinking of it are huge.

[brin_bellway]

The thing for me, looking back, is that past!me was *so close* to putting two and two together. I *did* wear pollen masks and I *did* wear masks on airplanes, and in hindsight (it's 20-20) wearing a mask inside the grocery store feels like the tiniest step.

I think in my case, the problem was underestimating the importance of airborne transmission. I did plenty of anti-fomite measures, and I thought that explained why I got fewer colds than most people. It's possible that after a few more years of in-person work it would have dawned on me what in this universe dawned on me reading stuff about COVID transmission: I also *spend less time in public airspaces* than most people do. In particular, late-2010s!me spent about one-third to one-half as much time per week breathing public air as Normal People, and got colds about one-third to one-half as often (but much *more* often than early-mid-2010s!me, who didn't do in-person work). Which is, while not conclusive, certainly suspicious.

I still do anti-fomite stuff: I figure it's a good habit to keep up, cover my bases, keep my contamination sense sharp (it certainly comes in handy when I'm dealing with things like raw meat or poison ivy). But I suspect it's a sideshow, and the main event is respiratory protection. I don't think you'll be seeing me in anything below a KF94 anytime soon.

---

(some context on why I care so much about not getting colds, since some people might be wondering at this point)

[mindstalk]

Interesting! You were definitely far closer than I was, no masks at all. I lived in actual Japan for 3 months, and it didn't occur to me to pick up some masks, even though I probably saw some on actual non-manga people. Maybe it would have if I'd gotten sick, dunno.

And I went from Japan to the utterly horrible hay fever of Melbourne with no defense other than loratadine and tissues and maybe not going out as much.

I got about 2 colds a year through the 2010s, which I think is normal? I don't know about normal for me, records don't go back that far. I do have vague ideas of having gotten 6 colds or fevers a year, but that might be childhood, not college. 2010s were pretty isolated in some ways -- no school or office work -- but OTOH I very regularly went to a bar every Sunday for face to face socializing in a group.

[brin_bellway]

Mm, yeah, level of exposure to the massive cesspit that is congregate schooling is probably a significant factor. The "4 colds/year" figure I often see passed around may be considering parents getting exposure through their children (or maybe is an average of adults and children? I notice Wikipedia now gives an adult figure of 2 - 3 colds/year, with children as 6 - 12), and I serve a lot of students at work.

(I grew up around homeschoolers who wondered if one day society would look back in horror at the *social* environment it used to condemn its children to, but now I'm wondering if it will look back in horror at the *epidemiological* environment it once condemned its children to (and, by proxy, everyone who interacted a lot with children!).)

I was getting about one cold every 6 - 9 months while working maskless in a restaurant (part-time, ~10 - 20 hours/week, with hours tending to be higher in the summer), and one every 1 - 3 years when I was a fully study-from-home student and only doing in-person stuff a couple times a week for shopping and socialising (often outside!). My last cold was January 2019: I've already broken my all-time record of 34 months between colds (November 2012 - September 2015), and fingers crossed I'll keep my streak going for a while yet.

[hhimring]

I actually remember considering it occasionally, very tentatively, at a time when I was only aware of the Japanese doing it, except in hospitals and similar environments. Apart from practical issues like being much less clued up on availability and types, I was concerned about social acceptability: wary of other people feeling insulted or even considering me potentially unfriendly or hostile.

[squirrelitude]

Hell, about 10 years ago I got the one case of flu I can remember having in my adult life, and I thought nothing of going down to the pharmacy myself under a 103°F or so fever and getting some meds. No mask. And the person I was with didn't think anything of it either.

I'm sure I washed my hands, though. -.-

I think that there has been a *huge* de-emphasis in the US on airborne disease spread, definitely due to the CDC but also maybe just because of prevailing epidemiological schools of thought. If I cover my coughs and wash my hands, we're good, right? It took a *lot* of unlearning that during the pandemic.

There has still not yet been an official announcement of "we're really sorry, we were wrong, masks are actually super important for controlling spread of lots of diseases", and I think that is continuing to make things worse than they need to be.