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Comment by ajju | Hacker News Reader

In my experience not wanting to mask unless there is a meaningful sense of risk is a phenomenon equally strong in India (for example) and so I do not believe it has to do with the western propaganda.

If you visited India after the first wave, most people masked, enforced by the police - as they should have. Soon after the 2nd wave (which was bad but resulted in near-endemicity(?)) - after vaccines where widely available and well accepted in India -and to this day, you will see a vast vast majority in India don't mask. A visible minority mask everywhere and are not looked down upon or derided because of it. There is no meaningful propaganda either way right now.

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> There is no meaningful propaganda either way right now.

In Europe, in some places, there is and it's sometimes more or less subtle. Local supermarket I go to has a sign "masking is no longer mandatory but it's okay to wear a mask if it makes you feel safer". Which is not how masks are supposed to work (we were told to mask to protect others) and it shouldn't be about feelings.

Meanwhile the cleaning cart station (that sprinkles cart bars with soap/disinfectant) is collecting dust in a corner. I think it would have been nice to keep that from the covid period. But no, we have to erase memories of it.

I think the "mask to protect others" message was a mistake. If you mask to protect yourself you can use a mask with an exhalation value, which is more comfortable. I suspect a lot of opposition to masks is from people who only tried valveless masks. And protecting yourself still indirectly protects others, because you can't infect others unless you are infected.

> Which is not how masks are supposed to work (we were told to mask to protect others)

A well fitting N95 / FFP2, or better, respirator mask protects the wearer to a large extent, even if others don't mask. The "protect the others" message was in 2020, when mostly only surgical masks were available.

I know. But we are talking about mandatory masks here and it only ever was about surgical masks in my country and bordering countries (except Hamburg at some point apparently). The sign is referring to those masks as well, which were the most common ones in circulation. The people who wrote the sign didn't have N95/FFP2 in mind when they wrote it.

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