If I can wear a respirator to sleep for 7–8 hours a day, you can wear a respirator for ~20 minutes in the grocery store and for the ~3 hours you spend at a theatre/concert venue and your mass transit commute and the several hours you spend at sci-fi conventions to meet famous elderly people and in the waiting rooms for medical appointments and at church and the boring work conference your boss sends you to and the protests and on your flights and in the airports and the local street festival and

I arose at 11 am only to have my heart explode when I looked out the window to see a family of itty bitty raccoon babies (with their mum) scrambling around in the garden and climbing the mulberry tree.

Re: testing — we also don't know if the people who bother to test with RATs are doing all the oral swabbing or just the nasal swabbing.

Common Misconceptions about COVID Hold Strong as New Variant Spreads

Media has the public talking about the "razor blade" COVID variant, but years of inaccurate public health messaging have taken their toll

“Wear a mask when there isn’t a HEPA filter” Guys. Babes. My dudes in sky monsterism. Dearest of all warm weather kiddies. You do not know where there is and isn’t air filtration going on at all times. Just like you do not know who is asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic with Covid at any given time. Just like you do not know who is vulnerable to viruses at any given time. Stop. Trying to. Cherry-pick when. You wear a mask. Just commit to wearing a respirator in public already.

• Imperfect masking (badly-worn surgical masks, ill-fitting cloth masks with suspect filtration) during mask mandates combined with occupancy limits kept Covid levels low pre-2022 • If people still got sick while wearing cloth masks without filtration, of course they think masks don’t work • Anything is better than nothing doesn’t quite work when the general population opts for nothing • We’re clearly still looking for kind, nonjudgmental ways to guide imperfect maskers to better respirators