>> offered significant protection Which, by the way, they do not if it's only the healthy who are wearing them or if people are wearing them with their nose st

>> offered significant protection Which, by the way, they do not if it's only the healthy who are wearing them or if people are wearing them with their nose sticking out above. And even if they did, C19 is now endemic, and without a vaccine (which might not ever materialize), everyone will get it eventually, if not now then 6 months from now. So lose that weight, deal with that blood pressure problem, manage your diabetes, while you still have the time. As an aside, I find the response to C19 to be tragically (or comically, depending on your perspective) bad on the ground in almost all countries. Get this - one of the most reliable, easy to instantaneously test markers for whether you are _definitely_ infectious or not is _fever_. Contactless, accurate IR thermometers exist and could be deployed in arbitrary quantities. FLIR cameras also exist, and object detection algorithms can be run on-device in 2020 to identify the potentially sick people. And yet we do not measure people's body temperature when they enter public places such as a grocery store. It is well understood that we need to protect the elderly, yet instead of making it possible for the elderly to stay home indefinitely (by e.g. offering government sponsored groceries, or at least grocery delivery) we make them go to the grocery store. Several states went as far to thin the herd as to put C19 patients _into nursing homes_, which is absolutely insane. Medical personnel in some of those nursing homes is still not sufficiently isolated from the general population. Close to a half of US deaths are from those nursing homes - the statistic has been known for a couple of months now, but you won't find it in the press, for obvious reasons. Why is this? Remember cringing when you had to vote for local candidates? People with little to no qualifications, some of whom (at least where I live) tell you in their candidate disclosure they're mentally ill? Those same people, after they are elected, go up the ladder, and some of them end up in the higher level positions in local and state governments. It's similar to Gell-Mann amnesia, in a way. They're still inept and insane. They're only there because other candidates were even worse. Yet people imbue them with some magical leadership and intellectual qualities they do not possess and rely on them with their lives. There should really be "against all" option on the ballot.