Apparently they’re going either way, so the question is if I want to indirectly contribute just myself to Covid spread. I’ve had Covid relatively recently so I think I’m supposed to still have immunity but that doesn’t stop me from spreading it, right? It’s a Friday at noon so the movie theater will be mostly empty ish.
If you must go, wear an n95 properly (over your nose and with a seal) whenever you are indoors.
Yeah that’s a pretty small risk as far as things go. At least for a weekday matinee, especially if it’s a slightly older movie. Wear an N95/KN95.
Sadly it’s a brand new movie (Wonka) but I’m going with an N95 anyways… If I die it’s karma
I would certainly describe Wonka as slightly older at this point. I saw it with my family over Christmas and it was nearly empty, I’d be shocked if it was busy now
unfortunately already tried that with one of them and the other is a small child that I don’t know how to bully into wearing a mask without just coming across as an asshole
for kids you can frame it as they get to wear a mask
Fuck I should of thought of that
Though they might not associate masks with good things because their dead parent was immunocompromised and they probably had to wear them all the time leading up to his death
Genuinely though, why not? Not in a debate-bro way, I want the argument I can make next time so I can maybe convince them to stay home too. I also want to know how badly I fucked up
First off, it's going to be an extreme uphill battle if your family members are refusing to mask, because in my personal experience once someone crosses that line they never come back (well, for adults, anyway). I'm glad to see that you're at least taking it seriously enough to be wearing an N95. My main arguments that I give to other people in my life are as follows:
- COVID wastewater levels are still very high, meaning COVID hasn't gone away. As a result, we should still take COVID seriously and take necessary precautions, because everyone agrees that catching COVID is bad.
- As the vast majority of people are no longer taking any COVID precautions, any time spent indoors (or outdoors in large crowds) therefore comes with an elevated risk of catching COVID. We wouldn't go to a restaurant without a mask in 2020, right?
- Vaccinations/recent COVID infection will provide a short term reduction in your risk of catching COVID, but it's not a reduction to 0, and this assumes the variants are the same (which atm at least is likely for recent infection as I think the dominant strain is at like 80% of all cases).
- The more times a person gets COVID, the more likely they are to suffer from a variety of health complications like heart attack, stroke, long covid, etc. Additionally, each time someone gets COVID it seems to weaken theirimmune system, making future infections more likely.
- Knowing all this, is going to [insert event here] worth the risk of long-term and potentially permanent damage to [my/your/our/whatever] health?
Imo seeing a movie one could easily watch at home in a few months is not worth it.
Lastly, while it's not relevant to the case at hand, when it comes to general socializing, ~50% of COVID transmission is from asymptomatic people and home tests have around a 50% false-negative rate. IIRC the CDC's recommended testing regimen is three tests on three consecutive days, but that can be prohibitively expensive and ime very few people are willing to go through the effort. To give some personal context, I'll acknowledge I'm somewhat of an extremist. Outside of maybe a dozen interactions with people who have been willing and able to do those tests, the only other event I've gone to since COVID started was a sibling's wedding (where I wore an N95 at the outdoor ceremony and then didn't attend the reception).
I can’t believe that I’ve been “Covid-aware” for a few months now and it’s still far worse than I conceived of it as (and I already thought of it as an invisible airborne murder virus that was still circulating through the population). That’s… fun.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to get it through to them for the reason you already specified, which sucks, because I’m living with them and they’re paying for really luxurious and nice lodgings for me, and have been generally supportive of me. I wish I could get through to them but the hyper normalization has resulted in them thinking of any kind of request I give them to mask or take precautions as “scary” and like some kind of intrusion.
Yeah, it's extremely frustrating. Really shows the power of propaganda, though I imagine it also helps that people desperately want COVID to be over because the alternative is, as your family member pointed out, "scary". I'd suggest taking a gander at the Covid.Tips link in the sidebar, as it was made explicitly as an aid to convince people to take COVID seriously.
I’ve actually read Covid.tips already, and it’s a great resource- I may not have internalized it very well because I was reading it in the context of having just gotten out of an argument with family
Ok well I’m here, too late now. Thanks for the advice! n95 gang
I've got a public facing job that sometimes requires me to be on my knees while people bend over and breathe directly on me, and I haven't gotten sick since wearing an n95 at my job and in public for the past few years. Before the pandemic I would get sick every other month or so, and go though a few bottles of cold medicine a year. They work.
In the future if you want to try to avoid getting sick from your family, or infecting your family if you get sick, you can build a cr box or buy a hepa filter for your house or room and isolate and/or mask whenever someone has "a cold".
If you’ve recently had COVID, you wear a properly fitting n95/kn95, don’t eat or drink in the theater you’ll most likely be ok. You certainly won’t be a vector for further spread.
