I, like a lot of people am dead sick of wearing facemasks. I also, like almost everyone else, use the really cheap ones and I reuse them over and over until they fall apart. I pull them under my chin until I see someone approaching that is wearing one, and for foreigners and locals alike there seems to be a movement of sorts to not wear them at all.
The debate has been going on for a while about how silly it is that there are certain places you have to wear masks and others that you don't. The main one that comes to my mind is the shopping malls where if you are walking around you have to have a mask on, but if you sit down at any of the packed restaurants and coffee shops you no longer are required to do so. Does Covid not know how to go down or something?
The CDC, who I think has basically destroyed all of their credibility in the past 2 years admitted in January that the cloth surgical masks that most people are wearing are almost useless, citing that they have around a 2% chance of preventing the spread. I am doubtful of that percent claim because the probably wanted to make that number as high as possible without outright lying.
While there probably are some masks out there that do actually work and I keep hearing about N-95 masks being the ones that do, the ones that I see the people in Vietnam wearing are not these masks. Everyone is wearing the blue or white masks that don't even form a seal on your face.
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There are stories about hefty fines being imposed on people that go around maskless but I don't actually know anyone that this has happened to so it might be a myth. I've personally never even seen a police officer that wasn't sitting in an air-conditioned traffic box so I wouldn't get too worried about that.
While I comply with these mandates, I do it to a minimal degree. I wear it when there are various sentinals such as mall security who will stop you if you don't wear it, and then once inside I almost immediately remove the mask because everyone else does so as well.
I look forward to the day when the authorities will admit that this has all be a waste of time and some sensibility can take over. I think most of the world that still has mask mandates in place are just afraid to admit that they were wrong. As Vietnam looks to reopen for tourism on the 15th of March, I have a hard time believing that tourists are going to be terribly pleased to have to mask up all the time.
I am not a scientist and I don't believe we are ever going to get truthful information about masks or anything else related to Covid. What I do know is that all of the mandates that have been imposed around the world against Covid didn't work, even when everyone was complying.
Isn't it about time we left it up to the individual how worried they are about this and let them make the choice about how protected they need to be? I'd sure like to see it that way.