Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐Apr 21, 2025
LRT: Good article by a fellow FilAm about masking. I do think that it’s time for the performative masking to end, and for US society to adopt the pre-COVID practices of most countries in Asia, where people customarily wore masks whenever they were sick, around sick people, or felt the preventative need for it. The SARS epidemic wasn’t the impetus for Asian people wearing masks, it was already common practice in Asian cities, because of pathogens, pollution, and population density.
Show threadGemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐Apr 21, 2025

I stopped wearing masks in public sometime last year. Wearing a mask is mildly annoying, now that I need reading glasses virtually all the time, but it’s hardly a terrible burden. I am fully vaccinated and have had one cold since 2014, and that was before COVID. I still carry an extra KN95 mask in my handbag*, and will put it on, if necessary.

It’s important to remember that masks do not really so much prevent you from breathing in pathogens, so much as they prevent you breathing them out.

Show threadGemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐

* The truth is, I’ve been carrying N95 masks in my handbag since 2001-09-11, and that has often been supplemented by ANSI Z87 impact resistant safety glasses and pairs of nitrile exam gloves and leather work gloves. These items do not take up much space or add much weight. Every New Yorker who saw the cloud of cement dust from the collapsing World Trade Center towers can understand why and how these items might be useful.

#masks #masking #PublicHealth #survivalism

Apr 21, 2025 at 2:31amWeb
Show threadGemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐Apr 21, 2025
Equally importantly, I suffer from chronic allergic rhinitis, and I am an indifferent housekeeper who was born to a Registered Nurse and a Medical Doctor. So, I live in a dust-filled home, and every time I clean things, I wear an N95 mask or I have a terrible allergy attack. I buy diphenhydramine by the 100 count bottle. I am also a DIY person, and that means I occasionally do things that create construction dust (sawdust, gypsum dust, etc.), so i always have a supply of N95 masks.
Show threadGemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐Apr 21, 2025
The first time my mother suggested to me, when I was a teenager, that I wear a mask while cleaning my room to stop the allergy attacks, I laughed, and then I had an allergy attack. The next time, I wore a mask, and I didn’t have an allergy attack.