>>13495027
Never say "never"?
NYTimes just printed op-ed Masks aren't needed outside anymore
Turns out in Jerusalem that announcement was made a week ago.
"Author Headshot
By David Leonhardt
Good morning. We’re looking at two Covid questions people may have heading into summer.
The boardwalk in Long Beach, N.Y., this week.Johnny Milano for The New York Times
‘Based on science’
Should you still be wearing a mask outdoors? And how should you reorient your family’s life once the adults have been vaccinated but the children have not yet been?
Those are two Covid-19 questions on many people’s minds, and The Times has just published two stories that address them, based on interviews with experts. A common theme is that it’s OK to start making some changes to your behavior and loosening up in careful ways — or at least to begin thinking about it.
A mask outdoors?
On the issue of outdoor mask wearing, it helps to review a basic fact: There are few if any documented cases of brief outdoor interactions leading to Covid transmission. If you’re passing other people on a sidewalk or sitting near them on a park bench, the exposure of exhaled particles appears to be too small to lead to infection.
“Viral particles quickly disperse in outdoor air, and the risk of inhaling aerosolized virus from a jogger or passers-by are negligible,” my colleague Tara Parker-Pope writes, citing an interview she did with Linsey Marr of Virginia Tech. As Dr. Muge Cevik, an infectious-disease expert at the University of St. Andrews, says, outdoors is “not where the infection and transmission occurs.”
Still, why not try to eliminate even a minuscule potential risk and tell people to wear a mask at all times? Because that’s not an effective way to reduce overall risk. “I think the guidelines should be based on science and practicality,” Marr said. “People only have so much bandwidth to think about precautions.”
There are still important precautions to take, ones that are much more based in science than universal mask wearing. Unvaccinated people should wear masks when in close conversation with people outside their family — even outdoors — and should almost always wear a mask when indoors and not at home. Vaccinated people should continue to wear a mask in many indoor situations, to help contribute to a culture of mask wearing. It’s the decent thing to do when more than half of Americans"
SO UNVACCINATED ARE PUNISHED