Edit: just to clarify, I don’t have anything against anyone who believes in the mask effectiveness and wants to wear it. But I don’t see the point of enforcing the half assed way things are being done.
Also keep ventilation from above right on you at least a little...
Much more frightening were all the people in queues at the airports, bad ventilation, coming close, not wearing a mask at all.
Why so scared? Same reason, didn't want to get even a single day wasted for the first and quite costly vacation, glad it all worked out!
That claim has been made but is questionable. The masks were designed to reduce exposure to the wearer, not so much from the wearer.
It's a matter of physics: When you inhale the suction generated automatically pulls the mask tighter on your face such that the air you breathe in essentially all has to pass through the mask but when you exhale, not so much.
In designing a mask there is a choice between a finer mesh or a looser one. If you pick a very loose mesh - say, cotton gauze - then air is easy to push through when you exhale but so are virus particles. On the other hand if you pick a very tight mesh - say, N95 or better - then air is much harder to push through but exhaling forces the mask slightly away from the face such that moist potentially virus-laden breath puffs out the sides and top. This is why your glasses fog up when wearing an N95 - moist air is escaping out the top of the mask completely unfiltered. (You can find youtube videos demonstrating this process with cigarette smoke). Double- or triple-masking doesn't help either - that makes it even harder for air to pass directly through the masks so even more air pushes out the side and top instead.
If your N95 is VERY well fitted and the strap VERY tight - tight enough to make your ears hurt - you'll get less escape, but wearing a mask that way is sufficiently uncomfortable that almost nobody does it.
In short, an N95 does plausibly filter nearly all the air you breathe IN, but if you want to filter the air you're breathing OUT, you really should be wearing a cleanroom suit.
In theory you don't have to do anything mate. Just lie down in a coffin at home, shut the door and I bet you you won't catch COVID or any other mild respiratory illness. If to you the meaning of life is to get born, not catch COVID under any ridiculous circumstances and then die then this is a dead sure way of achieving your dreams!
I rather live life, take risks, feel my heart beat, go out and spend intimate time with other people, feel the thrill of being close to other human beings, feeling the joy of a person's touch, seeing their beautiful face when they laugh, share food and drinks without being paranoid and indulge myself in everything the world has to offer. Getting a mild cough or feeling a week a bit ill because of a flu every few years is a small price to pay for all the amazing memories I'll collect along the way.
The conservative (true sense of the word) position on this is so frustrating to communicate, because those who want to keep these sorts of policies and patterns are so often coming from people with a risk tolerance profile that I genuinely can’t understand or relate to.
There was and still are good reasons to be careful.
It would have been just stupid to get COVID out of yolo.
Now doctors have much more experience with it, vaccines exists.
There are studies about it.
You don't get infected with COVID just because it's a mix of your own immune reaction, the amount of particles etc.
A mask is really easy to wear and reduces your risk.
I'm not advocating for mask mandates at this point or let's say I don't care about it but if you want to reduce the risk of having COVID while on holiday, I would suggest trying to wear a mask.
Independently of it, in Germany the hospitalization is currently high and plenty of personal is sick. I still don't want to be in a situation of having something really bad and having to be in a hospital right now.
They are nice to wear for this reason.
But when I'm wearing them I do have a proper mask.