Yeah, it's annoying and more often than not they're streaming it on social media for attention. It's been a year and a half of the pandemic, just follow the damn rules of the establishment that you are voluntarily shopping in.

Wearing one outside ignores the science and is not virtuous. I just got back from Alaska and couldn't not help notice some people out in the middle of nowhere with them on. Is that virtuous or just plain stupidity?

Virtue signalling is never good despite appearances because that's all it is, appearances.

Wearing a mask outside doesn't hurt you or anyone else, and could be a cue to remind people who left the house without their mask to go back and get one.

Maybe they're just used to wearing it, forget they have it on, or have it adjusted just right so it's not fogging up their glasses?

More likely though, it's a conscious effort: "I'm going to wear this mask, by God, and I'm going to, deliberately and with malice aforethought, irritate the living shit out of a bunch of guys on the Internet who would have starved and whined themselves to death if they'd been faced with rationing of the sort the nation experienced during World War II. In the face of a nation and, in the case of a particularly sociopathic banker from London who owns a sofa more expensive than some cars, a world in which modern people are no longer capable of coping with adversity, I am going to wear this mask and make a statement -- and that statement is, 'Masks on for safety! I wear because I care!'"

Why are you cherry picking the south when countless northern States have higher death rates than Calironia and southern states?

Sounds like you’re just trying to make some sort of cultural or political statement without any basis

Reposted from the prior page:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...s-us-by-state/

12 of the 15 highest death rates are not in traditional southern States (if we assume that southwestern States like Arizona are not lumped in with the ‘south’, and even if they are a lot of northern States performed just as poorly or worse)

If we insist on doing this (not sure what the point is?), these Southern States had lower death rates than California:

West Virginia
Missouri
Kentucky
North Carolina
Maryland

I think people wear (or don't wear) them for a variety of reasons. I won't wear mine outdoors for example because the science simply doesn't support it. Wearing one to make some stranger feel safer isn't a compelling reason. I wear one indoors because the science does support it and most places still require them.

If you're wearing (or not) just to make a political or social statement, that reeks of insincerity and not really a show concern for others.

I forget I have mine on half the time, but like you, I too often fly into a rage over the notion that someone might be doing something that makes someone else feel safer. Why, I can't even watch that scene in Titanic where the mother is telling the lullaby to the children and they go to sleep as the ship sinks. I feel quite firmly that the mother should have instead dragged the children into the hall, held them upside down by their ankles, and screamed at them to "LOOK INTO THE VOID, CHILDREN!! LOOK AT YOUR ONCOMING ICY DEATH AND DESPAIR!!"

A common theme I've seen online is that people like the anonymity that wearing a mask provides. I saw a post on social media by a woman who just got vaccinated and was going to keep wearing the mask around for awhile because she'd gone an entire year without some random guy in the street telling her she should smile more. I can see how a mask can offer some feeling of protection for an introvert in public. There's millions of different human experiences out there, and to believe that someone could not actually want to wear a mask because you don't is naïve .

That being said I also saw a popular meme that was something along the lines of, "I got vaccinated and want to take my mask off, but I also don't want people to think I'm a Republican..." So there definitely is some of that going around as well.

You made the claim of "10 months" so you have to provide it if called upon, meanwhile I was talking about the CDC and their guidelines. "Anti-science" is new...has this insult been hurled in other parts of the forum or previous COVID discussions? The usual reversal (calling you pro-science) won't work, so I'll just say that's an unvirtuous signal :cool:. Remember I'm not wearing my mask unless the rules on the door say it, and since there's no door for outside...no mask. Just because I don't wear it doesn't mean I can't step-up for the virtuous individuals that continue to do so.
Wording is important...they are being "cautious" :D, but as of the new guidelines they are being "overly cautious". :notacrook:

If there is no action behind it (like putting on a mask) then it's just a though processes that nobody can actually prove. You have to walk up to each person wearing/not wearing a mask and ask them "WHY?".

Are we wearing masks to mitigate of transmission/ spread of Covid or out of appearances? I get that some people have reasons for wearing them beyond of Covid (as suburbanite touched upon) but that's their decision. However, I am not going to feed into the hysteria by wearing one when it's not necessary simply out of appearances. Again, we are talking about outdoors.

And again, I am in total agreement with you that it is utterly despicable that someone might do something solely to make someone else feel safer. It's just appalling. :yuck:

Masking as a political party badge is only important to the most partisan obsessed people.

I see people outdoors all over the place where I live—young Moms, older men, etc and they aren’t wearing masks. They aren’t all of the same political stripe.

That's what I thought, but I guess it's really to say you didn't vote for that one guy? I would wear my mask just because it's in the rules or whatever...and now I don't, because of the new rules. Instead of focusing on if they are good or bad I just do em.
You're not feeding into the hysteria unless another person around you thinks that you are :haha:, if everybody nods their head at your location....very virtuous.

It was catastrophic, but the deaths just weren't officially tallied as COVID-19.

I've looked at the data, and it's clear that there is a huge variance in Florida between excess deaths and their self-reported COVID-19 mortalities. That's very weird because it would suggest that, if these people weren't unexpectedly dying from COVID-19, then something else was going on in Florida last year that caused many more people to die unexpectedly. Through end of September, only 59% of Florida's excess deaths are attributed to COVID-19, while in New York 81% of excess deaths are attributed to COVID-19. It's way more likely that both NY and FL are under-counting COVID-19 deaths than it is that either state is over-counting.

It is also clear that the lockdowns did matter. Florida had higher increase in excess deaths (from any reason) than New York did -- at least through September 2020. The excess deaths in Florida started to skyrocket in June of 2020, which was when deaths in NY started to dramatically fall back to normal.

^ it's becoming more clear that comparing states against one another on deaths or cases metrics is pretty useless because of the wide variances in how different states are testing for covid and tabulating their covid deaths.

we're probably not ever going to get a terribly clear apples-to-apples picture, because like everything else in our stupid-ass nation, it got all stupid and political.

but that still won't stop the axe-grinders on both sides from grinding their axes, because that's what axe-grinders do.

and the drain continues to be thoroughly circled.....

No. According to you, refusing virtue signal with a mask on outdoors is tantamount to telling kids going down with the Titanic they are fucked and are about to die in the worst way possible. Never mind that person without a mask could be fully vaccinated, let's feed into those irrational fears.

It should also be pointed out that Florida is still seeing lots of deaths while they have tailed off in the rest of the US. Our rolling 7-day average is higher now than it was in November even with all the vaccines. Somehow even post vaccine Florida's death rate is on an incline again (vaccine rates in the African American community are still very low).

Masks on vaccinated people are the new red MAGA hats, but for the different side...