> COVID made spending time outdoors/around other people an actual physical danger for over a year, and the psychological effects of that are lingering.

It actually never stopped being a physical danger. The only thing that changed is how long it takes for the damage to unfold.

At the start of COVID, people were rightfully shocked that hospitals and morgues were overflowing, and they reacted accordingly. That's no longer an issue (for now) with these latest strains, but acquiring Long COVID and dealing with its effects is definitely still a real concern.

Long COVID is vastly underdiagnosed. You might not get it until your 4th/5th/6th re-infection. That reinfection might also be asymptomatic, and/or Long COVID doesn't set in until weeks or months afterward, meaning people often don't link the two events. People not taking precautions (majority) are getting re-infected on average once per year since immunity from a previous infection typically wanes after 6 months, and there are about two waves per year for any given area.

Vaccines are of limited utility since they don't prevent transmission. A consistently worn N95 in public spaces is the only reliable means of defense, and everybody in your household needs to do that in public for it to be effective within your household.

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johnnyanmac 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

We still know so little about Long COVID. For all we know, it's just going to be the next (or contemporary) microplastics debate where we just have to live with it until we start really seeing long term effects. But since it's not affecting our ability to make the rich richer, we won't get much serious mainstream support for the issue. Instead focusing on diligent work in labs in the background.

All that said: I don't do it myself, but I don't judge people who choose to mask up regularly when going out in public. It's a semi-normal thing in Asian communities, and I have two close (non-Asian) friends who do it. If nothing else, COVID de-stigmatized that practice here in the US.

	▲	swed420 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I appreciate that. As somebody who masks regularly in 2026, I definitely don't judge people who don't. Most people don't know the true risks, and even for those who do, the two lifestyles come with some important tradeoffs that I don't think should be forced on anybody, one way or the other.

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4fterd4rk 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'll take you seriously when I see scientists and doctors masking up and taking the precautions that you COVID truthers still cling to. Go to an infectious disease conference. They don't look like people who think like you.

	▲	swed420 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's not hard to find the science backing my claims. As for why doctors don't mask, they're humans too, and just as susceptible to propaganda and competing forces like wanting to "return to normal" or simply having kids in school and assuming getting them to mask is too tall of an order (frankly, it is imo). Here's a Canadian researcher who still masks and explains how the many 'mistakes' were made in order to convince people to throw caution to the wind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCft7qu1Iv4 For the US version, this is a decent timeline of events: https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co... The best part was after that extended disinformation campaign, lawmakers asked people what they wanted to do, then told them what they wanted to hear: https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous... But that didn't make the threat go away. People just pretended that it did. Group psychology is weird like that. Further compounding matters is the fact that neverending COVID reinfections impacts the part of the brain responsible for executive function, making it that much easier for people to not care. The more common and palatable term is "brain fog." Toxoplasmosis has a similar known reinforcing effect.