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People Are Still Wearing Masks in 2025
On any given day, most of us are encountering people who still wear face masks. They don’t seem to care whether or not the pandemic is essentially over. For some reason, or for multiple reasons, they continue to wear masks, not just indoors but outdoors, too. A person can’t even go to the grocery store without seeing people wearing masks.
Are those people who wear masks just living in fear, or do they have a reasonable explanation for wearing them?
Besides being at high risk, such as living with cardiovascular disease, pregnancy, obesity or diabetes, one blogger, who is also a mental health professional, suggests there are a multitude of reasons for people to continue to wear masks; I list a few of them here:
Maybe they do not personally have any of these risk factors, but someone they care about and spend time with does, and they are trying to protect their children, family, partner(s), friends, coworkers, parents, church members, classmates, teammates, patients, constituents, or other community members.
Maybe they live with or recently had contact with someone who has been sick, and understand they could be carrying that illness but don’t want to spread it to others.
Maybe they realize many illnesses, including norovirus, influenza and 49% of COVID infections, can occur without any symptoms, and they know that infectious diseases still spread even without symptoms or before symptoms develop – so they don’t assess whether they are ill or infectious to others based on how they feel, especially at a time when multiple viruses are running rampant.
So, the health protection aspect of wearing masks may apply to many people in the population. Here is one example:
When federal health officials recently announced that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks in most situations, Jaz Johnson was among those who kept hers on.
Johnson, 46, of Kansas City, Missouri, has received both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, but she has no desire to go maskless. For the past year, Johnson has avoided the colds and flu she normally gets. So has her 95-year-old grandmother, who lives with her.
Other people, consciously or not, may be choosing to hide behind their masks:
As mask mandates ease across the country, many people are finding that their affinity for face coverings extends beyond health reasons. Even with no requirement to wear their masks, some people are continuing to do so — having come to appreciate the reprieve they provide from stifling social expectations while out in public.
These mask-wearers say they see a multitude of benefits to covering up. No one can tell you to smile when you don’t feel like it. It gives you a break from putting on makeup. And it provides a degree of anonymity.
‘It’s exhausting having to put on this smiling, very calm, brave face,’ said Cassidy, 35, of Lake Tahoe, Nevada, who asked to be identified by first name only for privacy.
A Navy veteran, Cassidy has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia and said masks feel like a ‘shield’ that prevent uncomfortable interactions while running errands: ‘I can absorb the environment in a much more controlled manner without having to think about what my face is doing, and having to think about someone seeing my face.’
Essentially her mask provides her with a protective barrier that shields her from situations that cause her to be uncomfortable.
But some hospitals, based on new information released, are choosing extreme caution regarding mask-wearing:
With two states updating their guidelines this week [Jan. 2025] as parts of the U.S. confront what has been described a ‘quad-emic,’ mandatory masking in some circumstances has returned in eight states.
Duke Health in North Carolina and Mass General Brigham in Massachusetts this week updated masking and visitor guidelines. The two additions now bring the total to eight states that are requiring or strongly encouraging masking indoors following Wisconsin, California, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and New York.
The World Health Organization is also climbing on the bandwagon of caution when it comes to wearing masks. In one article, they address many questions or doubts that people have about continuing to wear masks. In the lead-in to the article, they made the following statement:
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In May 2023, the WHO announced that COVID-19 was no longer a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern,’ which characterizes the initial phase of a pandemic. However, the WHO has never ended the pandemic, and has repeatedly cautioned not to speak of COVID-19 in the past tense. It stated on December 31, 2024 that ‘the global public health risk associated with COVID-19 remains high.’
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New variants continue to emerge, and the virus is still causing significant illness and death around the world, even if hospitalizations aren’t at the peak they were before.
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Deciding whether to wear a well-fitted respirator mask (N95/FFP2 or better) indoors is about limiting the spread of a virus that hasn’t vanished. Just because the emergency has passed doesn’t mean the risk is gone.
Ultimately, all of us must make our own choices about wearing masks or not. I believe that some people wear them out of irrational fear or virtue signaling. Others may have auto-immune conditions that put them at risk.
But I hope that every person who is a normal, healthy person, will not wear the mask regularly. It creates a barrier between you and those people whom you encounter, and you might find yourself hiding behind it, isolating yourself from others.
Instead, let the world see who you are.
Published in Healthcare
I assume they have allergies, a cold, or low immunity. I’m leaving them alone just like I wanted the mask folks to leave me alone during covid. They should not wear them in certain places like banks.
Yes a lot of the mask up and stand six feet apart protocols was to enforce the deadly plague aspect of COVID.
As far as masks and other COVID protocols, the Amish ignored all of it.
Off of @VigilantFox at “X”
The Amish Died of COVID at a Rate 90 Times LOWER Than the Rest of America
This occurred even though: “They did not lock down. They did not mask. They did not social distance. They did not vaccinate. There were no mandates in the Amish community to get vaccinated. The Amish basically ignored every single guideline that the CDC gave us.”
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Of course the Amish also are outside and get a great deal of sun, which kicks the body into producing a great deal of Vitamin D.
Great thinking in this comment about the lame brains in that video:
Damp Squirrel @A_Damp_Squirrel I like when they wear a mask. It helps you identify the people to stay away from.
Yep, like #53.
Eric Scheske of the Amish America YouTube channel (who I’ve been following since before I even heard of such a thing as YouTube) did a video the other day about various health claims about the Amish. The kind of thing you claim here is usually not true. Eric made only a brief mention of covid, but didn’t have any information on rates of dying from covid, and without evidence I would tend to doubt that you do, either. One X post with no links to verifiable information does not constitute evidence.
Masks, 6 ft, and banning outdoor activities were all unverified, made-up, bad advice from the government officials.
And now Trump is making the same kind of mistakes the Biden administration made, especially in misuse of emergency powers to implement unverified, made-up, bad advice from government officials.
What are you expecting to be “verified?” Should we have not gone to the Moon, because it was never “Verified” by having done so before it was done?
Unless you name the mistakes, you wasted your time posting that comment.
That’s an excellent comparison. The space program didn’t happen because President Eisenhower pulled a program out of his rectal cavity one day and sent a man to the moon by the end of the week. It was developed incrementally, based not only on science, but on experience gained through testing and partial deployment of various subsystems. There was a lot of learning that took place at each step.
So you think the tariffs should be done a little at a time? That would completely defeat the purpose.
It’s interesting that you think there is a purpose to them. If you know what it is, maybe you should share that information with President Trump.
If the purpose is to move manufacturing back to the US then a steady path of incremental increases over years would do that but also without tanking the stock market. I don’t see the down side, tbh, because factories take time to build, supply chains take time to establish, etc. What’s the benefit of doing it all at once?
Edit:
Apart from political, of course. And even that is doubtful. The demographic that votes mostly Republican is also the demographic that is (understandably) most focused on their 401Ks.
Doing it gradually over time allows for adjustment and basically keeping things as they are, and prices increase slowly so that consumers don’t get a “shock” either.
Consumers not getting a shock seems like a good thing. Also for the markets. I guess we’ll find out.
Maybe the frog in the pot of water doesn’t really work, but in economics it can.
Also manufacturers have less incentive to relocate their facilities back to the US if their cost goes up 1% per year, than if their cost suddenly goes up 10% or more.
If they’re not paying attention to the extra 1% per year, they’re not likely to stay in business anyway.
A few days ago I made reservations for a trip to Eastern Europe through Delta. That may have been why I saw a big headline this morning which has Delta saying they’re not going to pay any 10% tariff on new AirBus planes. They don’t have a carve-out, they’re just not going to do it. They can’t handle the extra 10%, and they have clauses in their AirBus contracts that will allow them to defer any deliveries for reasons like that. And AirBus says it has enough flexibility in the pipeline that it will just move all orders from other countries ahead of U.S. orders in the queue.
Will that do Boeing any good and help it compete with Airbus? Maybe eventually, but Trump is not going to be president forever, and he is not going through Congress, which would be a way of giving these tariffs longer-lasting staying power.
So whether or not Trump thinks shock and awe is the way to go, some big companies have a way of making the changes in a more gradual fashion, anyway.
I normally fly Delta. Good Airline. I want them flying Airbus, not Boeing . I am OK with dying, but not motivated to speed up the process. Trump is now trying to kill me by having me fly in Boeing airplanes.
I never said they weren’t “paying attention.” But they can increase their prices by 1% per year without significant impact to their budget or scaring off customers.