I think the downside of not wearing a mask is, in fact, normalising not wearing a mask in the eyes of people who do not take into account that it’s not worn for a reason and because there is no one near me. Thus I try to put mask on when I see someone on the street even if they are far away.

I think not wearing masks again will be easy to normalise. For example, Hong Kong got hit by the first SARS and everyone wore a mask for a time, and then when it was over all was back to normal and masks quickly became rare.

I hope you are right, but I'm not convinced. Covid isn't just going to go away like switching off a light switch. A good number of people have gone way off the deep end with regard to "being safe". I'm not sure they will be able to reason about when the risk is low enough to be able to stop wearing a mask.

I believe once vaccines and better treatment are generally available and proven effective, it will be a cue to very quickly abandon excess caution for most people, even those who have gone to the extreme.

Larger countries (including the US) that are more sparsely populated and tend to rely on central messaging from authorities less will probably have areas that are slower at adopting new measures (or lack thereof), which may be frustrating, but I imagine large cities will be able to react promptly.

Some countries are now at nearly zero cases.

We should absolutely be normalizing wearing masks in public. In many parts of the civilized world (where, by miraculous chance, they've also handled Covid reasonably responsibly) people who were sick in public (or even just wanted to avoid putting on makeup) habitually wore masks pre-covid to avoid infecting others. I'd be willing to assert that it's exactly that habit (and a related set of hygiene conditions, in addition to an already-present infrastructure for home PPE) that helped them return to living much more normal lives through this pandemic.

I wrote in another comment up thread, one great result of this pandemic is that it could help to normalize mask wearing in general. People’s mouths and noses are disgusting, and a common source of non-lethal aerosolized diseases. There is really little downside to wearing a mask while around people and healthy upside.

The societal norm/expectation that we wear clothing in public is no big deal. Why can’t we have a similar mask-wearing norm? I don’t see many anti-clothers protesting city hall over their right to go naked.

One side-effect I am thinking of is that if our immune systems receive less challenge they could weaken over long term (maybe generations).

Hopefully that’s not how things work, or the effect has no practical significance.

Second best option, we’ll find a way to compensate for that.

Else, maybe we shouldn’t normalise masks to such a degree except for periods when it’s necessary.

Another side-effect is that masks should be replaced regularly, so everyone wearing masks at all times would mean a lot of waste (hopefully bio-degradable).

You know, I'd happily normalise "wear a mask if you want, especially if you're coughing". But without peer pressure in either direction once we're back to low stakes.

This was pretty much my experience in pre-COVID Hong Kong (which got hit by the first SARS earlier).