Infants basically ignore strangers or have mild interest in them. Infant eyesight is not good for distance; their perception is also in its infancy (their eyes

Infants basically ignore strangers or have mild interest in them. Infant eyesight is not good for distance; their perception is also in its infancy (their eyes detect photons but their brains are still learning to interpret the signals); their attention is correlated more strongly to sound than vision because sound is what they get in the womb. I mention strangers because the immediate caregivers of infants were generally not wearing masks around them most of the time even during the depths of the pandemic. Your friend is most likely engaged in motivated reasoning via confirmation bias; they are seeing what they expect and want to see. Infants in general often look spaced out or alarmed. Their facial expressions should not be taken to infer internal emotional state comparable to what an adult feels. Infant brains don’t yet work like adult brains. In addition, it’s not like COVID-19 is the first time human babies have been exposed to masks. Mask-wearing in public has been normal in some Asian cultures for decades, and of course some Muslim women cover their faces at all times outside the home.