05-30-2020, 09:22 AM
(05-28-2020, 08:52 PM)TheNomad Wrote: Shaming someone in this manner, to me, conveys fear of the shamer than I might be transmitting the virus to them.
Calling me brave would mean exactly what it says - that I am brave and do not fear THEM infecting me.
It has been established that a substantial proportion of people who catch Covid-19 get only mild or no symptoms. They go about their lives as one would with a cold, but in the process infect other people. This is one of the ways Covid-19 spreads.
Surgical masks reduce virus shedding by a factor of 3.4 and cloth masks do something similar. It's possible that if everyone would just wear a mask all the time the reduction in how much they infect other people would would largely or completely eliminate the pandemic without much or any additional mitigation required. Certainly everyone wearing a mask would help greatly.
However, wearing a mask protects other people from you; it doesn't protect you from other people. In your particular situation, all the other people wearing masks were protecting you, and your not wearing a mask was exposing them to risk.
So your first line above was correct.
However, a lot of people would consider saying "you're putting us all at risk by not wearing a mask" to be impolite, so they say something that makes no sense factually, but seems to fit socially, which is a standard neurotypical behavior. That may be what you were seeing in your second line above.
It's also possible that they thought that you were intentionally refusing to wear a mask and they could convince you to wear one by intimating that it would protect you, assuming that you would be selfish and refuse to wear it if you knew it only protected others.
And it's also possible that they were just clueless.