422 to mask or not to mask?

Editorial from a few weeks ago.

With data. 0.1% of Covid cases are spread outdoors. That's one in one thousand.

Meanwhile, my infectious disease doctor friends continue to say masks are not necessary outdoors, as they have since the beginning of the pandemic. Apparently, it's the structure of the virus. It's just not likely to spread outdoors, because of a certain membrane it has.

There's this phrase that's been floating around in my head, "liberal Taliban." Does that seem too much? Remember when we first invaded Afghanistan and we were all supposed to get up in arms about how the Taliban makes women wear face coverings? This is, like, the inverted weird version of that. Now we're the ones forcing people to wear face coverings, not for any reason other than perhaps proving how liberal we are.

You think that's a joke? My sister in law moved to a redder part of her state during the pandemic, and now that people are starting to take their masks off, she said, "Now it's hard to tell who is who."

She didn't mean our individual identities, she meant how red or blue we are.

So then the CDC starts to come out with advice that maybe we don't need masks outside.

And that maybe the whole 6 foot thing is a load of crock, too. (Basically, one gets the idea that our understanding of virus spread has come a long way in the past year. Or else, that the advice we got at the beginning is very, very dated.)

So, basically, when you breath out, your breath is warmer than the surrounding air. So it rises. This sends your CoV-2 aloft, rather than plummeting to the ground around you.

The CDC of course lost a lot of credibility during the early days of the pandemic, so despite their saying we don't have to wear masks outside, there are a variety of opinions.

Then the city updated our guidelines, to match the CDC. If you're vaccinated, outside and not in a crowd, you're ok maskless.

But walking around the city, where 75% of people over 16 have been vaccinated, I'd say at least 2/3rds of people are still wearing masks outside.

Until we sit down to eat, of course.

Now, I'm not sure what happened to Grant Colfax, but this is our temporary health director speaking a couple weeks ago. Since then, I've been mostly maskless. I pulled one on at the farmer's market, and when I was in a crowd where everyone else was wearing masks, but mostly, I'm making a point of not wearing one.

Why?

Because fucking science!!! If I needed the motherfucker, I'd wear it.

But at this point, what's up people? Its not a mask, it's a pacifier.

Finally, yesterday, the New York Times broke this. The CDC says vaccinated people can just go for it. Indoors, outdoors, have a blast! (Just bring that mask along to the doctor's office, and the airport, and, well... Even I'll probably be wearing one to the supermarket for a while.)

But, uh, wait. We're still under an outdoor mask mandate statewide? So those CDC rules don't apply? Nor the city rules?

Now I'm just confused.