To Mask or not to two - Mask Megathread cont.

It's long past time teachers such as yourself started to speak up about the treatment of children. If I had an animal in a freezing cold room with a cover on its face for 6 hours a day, I'd be locked up. "We were just doing as we were told/following the rules" isn't going to cut it once the dust settles and the damage that's been done to kids is fully known. Schools being closed the length they were and masking of children are 2 of the biggest scandals in the past 2 years.

We might finally be coming to the end of all this madness....it can't come a moment too soon.........

There's an absolute gem in this Irish Times article:

This is so ridiculous it's actually quite amusing. They don't believe masks really work but think they should be kept just to make people feel better! No wonder they chose to remain anonymous!

Seems to be a demographic of mainly middle aged women and the pronoun/BLM/Palestine freedom fighter brigade that are crying about these useless masks. People with not very much going on in their lives and they love to control what others do. They seem more worried about the goings on in USA and and a country they couldn't point out on a map. Idiots.

Someone said it above, masking kids in schools is utterly abhorrent and scandalous. All to appease a bunch of bed wetting curtain twitchers who can't let go of Covid.

Would not surprise me in the least if the gormless MM extended mask wearing.

From my own circle, not wearing a mask has been declared as "selfish" and doing so seen as "the right thing to do".

In the former case, the person is normally right on trend so no surprise, but the latter is from someone who usually has more of a copped on attitude. In both cases, they're regularly in the pub or out socialising generally.

The power of consensus and messaging right there. It's actually frightening how deeply it affects some people nowadays, and not just the younger or elderly generations. Middle-aged adults happy to sideline independent decision making and critical thought for the reassuring feeling of doing what they've been told, even if it doesn't make sense!

It's no wonder the Catholic Church held such sway for so long in this country.

There is definitely a different mentality here compared to many (but by no means all) other countries. I would imagine countries like Spain that had masks mandatory outside for most of the pandemic must be even worse.

I was in Copenhagen last September and the number of people wearing masks was effectively zero amongst Danish people. Zero. Not 50%, not 10%, not 5%. Zero. The only people wearing masks were tourists and even then there weren't many. So you can either draw the conclusion that Danes are reckless and selfish or they are good at risk assessment and trust their government and public health experts.

I think mask wearing will gradually decline here and will probably be fairly uncommon other than amongst the elderly by the summer months.

That's just people doing the best they can for themselves. We've all tried to do it and not terribly well at times.

Not really something I care about nor am I bothered by it. I'm certainly not about embrace any kind of score settling for people who dealt with things the best they could. The good news is that this is almost over for everyone, a cause for celebration and time to move on.

And to quote myself from way back in 2020, we can only be responsible for ourselves and people who matter to us. Things will come back to normal and it's really a waste of energy railing against public health policies. Including masks, they have been used as individual countries saw fit and some of that was questionable.

The game was up when the pubs and clubs went back to normal.

Teachers have just shown themselves to be ridiculously conservative, inflexible, lazy and irresponsible throughout this whole saga.

They were the only profession that didn't want to return to work after Xmas. Nice legacy that people won't forget.

Listen pal, I’m a teacher and any of the staff I’ve asked want masks gone. My close group of teacher friends want them gone long ago too.

You can’t just label us all like that. I wanted to return back after Xmas without masks. It’s the unions you need to be taking it out on. They’re a disgrace.

If the mask mandate ends soon, it will be very interesting to see the level of continued mask wearing in shops and transport, especially people who wear FFP2 masks for extra protection. I'd say the medical masks wearers will largely stop wearing them but the FFP2 people will continue.

**** me this is bad!!

Why won’t the woman below not go to the shop? Mental illness is huge now and that’ll be the the epidemic!

People are thick. HSE has the blue medical masks as the same level protection as ffp2, people won't drop them.

Edit to say by the same level of protection, I mean the HSE has high risk groups thinking they're fine with medical masks. Because it's medical masks or respirator. It's beyond me why they are getting away with their or on that website.