This sick but nothing really state you mention is weird now.

I think i never used to think of it, but after the pandemic like if my throat is a little sore but I don't feel tired or groggy am I still just expected to sit inside?A weak cold can linger for days, weeks sometime. I get multiple ways of thinking about it.

I think the guidance on colds is that they're less contagious after 4 days of symptoms, and more than 24 hours after the fever is gone. For covid it was different because you could be contagious before having symptoms, and the different strains had different numbers of days and even different sets of symptoms.

> mask up

I don't understand why people still believe that masking, at least as commonly practiced by the public at large, works in any meaningful way for the purpose you propose, especially after everything that happened between 2020 and 2022.

For commonly-available and affordable masks, the fibre spacing is typically much larger than the sizes of the particles that the masks are supposed to be stopping/limiting in this case. The particles pass right through, unimpeded, in both directions.

The claim that masks stop/limit contaminated "water droplets" is easily shown to be false when one witnesses somebody wearing a mask in 0° C (or lower) temperatures, and you can literally see how the water vapour from their breath is merely redirected out the gaps around the edges of the mask. In practice, their breath ends up focused at around head-level toward anyone next to or behind them, and this concentrated breath tends to linger longer than it otherwise would have.

From what I've seen, masked sick people will often just cough directly into their masks, too. Given the ineffectiveness discussed above, this just results in more forceful and unimpeded spreading of the particles than if the person had coughed into their hand (which is solid and can form a much tighter seal).

The ineffectiveness was further proven through the forced masking that millions upon millions of people in many places endured between 2020 and 2022. In Canada, for example, public masking was forced for well over a year, and even up to two years in a city like Toronto. Despite numerous other simultaneous lockdowns and restrictions that severely limited, or even outright eliminated, most social interaction, the problem that the masking was supposed to help mitigate apparently continued on unimpeded. If masking actually worked, it wouldn't have been needed for years.

At best, masking is a practice that makes the wearer think they're doing something "courteous", when they really aren't doing anything beneficial at all. It certainly gives others a false sense of security. Even worse, the mask is merely redirecting the wearer's breath toward anybody who is close by.

For the communal masking method that was deployed early on in the pandemic due to N95 respirator shortages, you're correct.

> At best, masking is a practice that makes the wearer think they're doing something "courteous", when they really aren't doing anything beneficial at all.

Fortunately in 2024, individuals have the freedom to choose to wear an N95 for their own personal protection. These devices are effective when worn properly, especially compared to vaccines when trying to minimize transmission to prevent reinfections which increase the risk of long COVID.

You know, surgeons don't wear masks solely to protect themselves, right? They wear them to protect their patients as well as themselves. In fact, that's kind of the main idea.

When the droplets that you exhale through a mask change direction, they lose velocity, and consequently range.

I blame the lack of hands-on science education for the large number of people who don't intuitively grasp concepts like this. It's easy to blame things like right-wing media, but the media would have less power over people if they were given the opportunity to cultivate some common sense in childhood. In that regard, it sounds like things are only going to get worse.

shorter version: Cochrane Review on efficacy of masking vs. respiratory disease

I've never had COVID. In fact, the last respiratory infection I had was in 2019. I sing, masked, in a 90 member choir where few people do mask, and we've had a couple COVID outbreaks. In one case, the people who sat to my right and left both caught the bug.

I'm not going to speak to the particulars of the various mask mandates. That's a complicated and nuanced question. One thing I know for sure: N95 masks, properly applied, make a huge difference to (at least) the person wearing them.