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Will you continue using a face mask after 19 July?

Will you continue to use a mask in certain situations after 19 July?

  • Yes

    Votes: 213 88.4%
  • No

    Votes: 14 5.8%
  • Maybe

    Votes: 11 4.6%
  • Don't know

    Votes: 3 1.2%

  • Total voters
    241
I think a lot of this stuff just gets wiped - it was only when I was thinking carefully about what actually happened last spring that I even remembered all that hoo-ha about PPE procurement and facemask stuff. If you're actually ideologically committed to forgetting it I'd imagine it's pretty much impossible to dial it back up.
Lucky he's got me around to constantly remind him, then. Lucky, lucky ham.
 
Well this is weird.....am not and never have been an anti- masks/vaxxer/ general crazy covid denier but now find myself in a position opposite it seems, as i really want to ditch the mask........it's a little ironic as we have spent the last 18 months shouldering huge amounts of abuse, aggression and general crazyness trying to get people to wear a mask where i work....we have never stopped people coming in and still give out a couple of boxes of free paper masks everyday....also huge amounts of people cottoned on to the fact if they say they're exempt they just carry on with no comment...

Health workers etc aside most people are not having to wear a mask for 8-9 and above hours a day, having a constantly scabby nose and sore mouth, having difficulty understanding what people are saying and they understanding you, getting really hot when doing anything physical on the shop floor...

as i said, it's ironic having spent all this time trying to get people to wear the fucking things now being in the opposite camp and being called a selfish cunt for wanting to stop wearing one (speaking for myself obviously)
 
Well this is weird.....am not and never have been an anti- masks/vaxxer/ general crazy covid denier but now find myself in a position opposite it seems, as i really want to ditch the mask........it's a little ironic as we have spent the last 18 months shouldering huge amounts of abuse, aggression and general crazyness trying to get people to wear a mask where i work....we have never stopped people coming in and still give out a couple of boxes of free paper masks everyday....also huge amounts of people cottoned on to the fact if they say they're exempt they just carry on with no comment...

Health workers etc aside most people are not having to wear a mask for 8-9 and above hours a day, having a constantly scabby nose and sore mouth, having difficulty understanding what people are saying and they understanding you, getting really hot when doing anything physical on the shop floor...

as i said, it's ironic having spent all this time trying to get people to wear the fucking things now being in the opposite camp and being called a selfish cunt for wanting to stop wearing one (speaking for myself obviously)

Well there is a difference between wanting to stop wearing a mask, and actually stopping wearing one. And there are differences between stopping wearing one, and encouraging others to do the same.
 
Well there is a difference between wanting to stop wearing a mask, and actually stopping wearing one. And there are differences between stopping wearing one, and encouraging others to do the same.
I would never encourage anyone to stop wearing a mask, have never been in 'that' camp.....however i am really conflicted now coz i fucking hate wearing it....after 18 months i haven't got used to it (as i said most people are not wearing a mask 8/9/10 hours a day)sometimes it makes me want to go in a corner and scream....i might well just fudge it and have one but only pull it up when i feel it's neccessary....so i'll just be a selfish cunt....:(
 
I heard an interesting podcast about that a little while ago. Essentially, if you were judging on prepandemic planning, you would have guessed, prepandemic, that the UK and the US were among the best-prepared nations on Earth. They ended up two of the worst-hit, most chaotically disorganised nations on Earth. What they lacked, which other places like South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc, had, was the flexibility to respond swiftly in a fashion that wasn't in the pre-prepared rulebook. The extensive preplanning actually hurt them.

This is one area where I hope that me being a tedious smartarse with knowledge of the subject well before the pandemic can actually help cut through some of the bullshit. Especially because I came out with a lot of this stuff long ago, so I dont get caught in the trap of bullshitters claiming this stuff could only be known with the benefit of hindsight.

It is on the record that at the start I thought this country was especially badly placed to handle this pandemic well. There were many reasons, I will focus on just a few now:

I was familiar with our pandemic plans, They were shit. They were based on the priorities of the establishment in this country, which in many ways boiled down to doing as little as possible apart from anything available on the drugs and vaccines front, and some basic public health messaging.

I have spoken before about how, for example, the UKs response to swine flu was criticised in the official review into the handling of that pandemic. A key complaint was that the response phase that the UK describes as 'contain' is actually not contain. The report said it should more accurately have been called a delay phase. And in my book at best it could be called 'delay and survey', at worst just 'survey'. And exactly the same thing still happens now - whenever there is a threat from a new variant, we claim we are trying to contain it, but mostly we are just surveying the situation and trying to find out how big the problem is and how quickly its growing. Not sincerely trying to stop it growing.

Another variation of these attempts to blame the rigidity of the rulebook rather than the rules baked into such plans being shit and built on shit priorities and bad orthodox attitudes, is the idea that our plan was designed to cope with flu not SARS. But when I've studied our plans, they would not cope any better with a bad (1918-like) flu pandemic either!

Another problem with that narrative is that the UK authorities actually engaged in a series of pandemic simulation exercises, and the results appear to have been so bad that they suppressed the results of the exercises. So they knew well before this pandemic that our plans were inappropriate to deal with a threat beyond a certain magnitude. And I believe at least one of those exercises even involved a theoretical SARS-like virus!

Also the running down of healthcare capacity gave us a disadvantage compared to the likes of Germany. Bed numbers matter.

Our plans were shit because they were based on the usual cold calculations the establishment orthodoxy in this nation treats as the gospel. Yes we were slow to shift from them, and the desire to return to them as much as possible as soon as possible has never left our establishment figures. Thinking the unthinkable and acting beyond our political and economic comfort zone was a very temporary phase of our response, one the authorities could not wait to get away from.

We also have a history of using the gains that vaccination offers for really shitty purposes, exploiting the new balance. For example over many years our governments, including new labour, decided to make our influenza vaccination programme larger and more far-reaching. But part of the prize that offered in their eyes was that they could reduce hospital capacity gradually over the years, because they figured vaccines could do some of the heavy lifting so they could get away with skimping on hospital surge capacity!
 
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I would never encourage anyone to stop wearing a mask, have never been in 'that' camp.....however i am really conflicted now coz i fucking hate wearing it....after 18 months i haven't got used to it (as i said most people are not wearing a mask 8/9/10 hours a day)sometimes it makes me want to go in a corner and scream....i might well just fudge it and have one but only pull it up when i feel it's neccessary....so i'll just be a selfish cunt....:(
I don’t think anybody wants to wear one really. But seriously, come on, it isn’t that bad to do so.
 
I would never encourage anyone to stop wearing a mask, have never been in 'that' camp.....however i am really conflicted now coz i fucking hate wearing it....after 18 months i haven't got used to it (as i said most people are not wearing a mask 8/9/10 hours a day)sometimes it makes me want to go in a corner and scream....i might well just fudge it and have one but only pull it up when i feel it's neccessary....so i'll just be a selfish cunt....:(

It would be better if you could at least postpone this.

Because we are in a really large wave of a really nasty variant that is more transmissible, the number of people infected at any particular moment in time is reaching ridiculous levels. So the timing of dropping masks now is spectacularly poor.

Even if you only waited till the schools broke up for summer holidays (already the case in Scotland) then at least the results of your actions (or rather you and many others combined) will be somewhat compensated for by all the behavioural & contact mixing pattern changes that happen during school holidays.
 
Following on from what I just said, if people think they are going to wear masks less then I'd at least encourage them to try to compensate for that in other ways. Assume your actions are not without consequence, and try really hard to sacrifice something else instead, if you really cannot bear masks any longer. ie the idea we can return to normality right now is bogus, so if you want the normality of not wearing a mask, be prepared to give up some other normal activity to compensate.
 
Blimey never been on the side that is seen as wrong.....and i can tell you 100% that where i work hardly anyone coming into the shop will be wearing a mask once the restriction goes...and before you all start shouting , credit me with my local knowlege please.....and am glad that people find them not that bad to wear but 45 hours a week, no i hate it and will and have put up with it but still hate it

Am actually quite taken aback at the vehemence of people's opinions....i thought it would be completely opposite considering the massive effort it's taken to get people to wear them in the first place
 
Following on from what I just said, if people think they are going to wear masks less then I'd at least encourage them to try to compensate for that in other ways. Assume your actions are not without consequence, and try really hard to sacrifice something else instead, if you really cannot bear masks any longer. ie the idea we can return to normality right now is bogus, so if you want the normality of not wearing a mask, be prepared to give up some other normal activity to compensate.
what sort of normal activity ?
 
what sort of normal activity ?

Anything that involves mixing with other people, especially indoors. Mitigation can involve avoiding some of those activities and scenarios, or doing things like massively improving the ventilation in key indoor environments.

Government advice for business suggests for example that CO2 monitors can be used to ascertain which indoor locations are suffering from a lack of adequate ventilation.
 
And frankly one of the perceived advantages of battling this virus in summer is that improving ventilation is considered more viable at this time of year, because people are less likely to be too cold. We have a window of opportunity (pun intended) to make the most of that.
 
Anything that involves mixing with other people, especially indoors. Mitigation can involve avoiding some of those activities and scenarios, or doing things like massively improving the ventilation in key indoor environments.

Government advice for business suggests for example that CO2 monitors can be used to ascertain which indoor locations are suffering from a lack of adequate ventilation.
I go to work and come home.....didn't go out before so that won't change...
 
I'm going to take a wait and see approach. For me it's not so much the masks but having to sit next to strangers on the buses again - that's going to be weird! I'm definitely still going to use hand sanitiser.

It’s an airborne disease, the risk of catching it through touch is far lower than through breathing it in. You’d be more protected wearing a mask and forgoing sanitising altogether (not that sanitising is a bad thing).
 
See if you can have a positive practical impact on your workplace environment then.
Not sure exactly what you mean but if it's wearing a mask i'll be a tiny minority....as i said (before people started piling in) i'm conflicted about it at the moment so haven't entirely decided and not whining or anything but not sure a lot of people get just how fucking awful this last 18 months has been for those of us working in supermarkets
 
Not sure exactly what you mean but if it's wearing a mask i'll be a tiny minority....as i said (before people started piling in) i'm conflicted about it at the moment so haven't entirely decided and not whining or anything but not sure a lot of people get just how fucking awful this last 18 months has been for those of us working in supermarkets
I've not been at work since the end of January and it's been lovely not having to wear a mask for 12.5 hours a day. My skin is loads better.
 
I've not been at work since the end of January and it's been lovely not having to wear a mask for 12.5 hours a day. My skin is loads better.
I have a permantly scabby nose (the paper masks are even worse for this but not so hot) mostly wear soft cotton masks......just coming to the end of a week off and it's lovely not having one on nearly every day
 
8 or so, sometimes more, depending how long my shift at work is.
I only wear one visiting the supermarket and the like, and even just for that limited time sometimes I have to stop what I'm doing and step outside to get some air. I could totally understand people really struggling to do a full shift without having the option of doing that.
 
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