Masking Outdoors and Covid
Mar. 13th, 2022 09:00 pmI don't think masking is overall as necessary outdoors unless someone thinks it's likely they'll be in a large crowd, but for various reasons I don't go outdoors without masking up. I joke about being neurotic but there are also practical considerations in my case that I think make it more important than it might be for the average person.
But in general, being outdoors considerably lowers transmission risk for airborne diseases like covid. This is because virus particles have much more air to disperse through and it's generally much easier to physically distance yourself from other people. I'm also fully vaccinated and have had a booster shot, but my understanding is that even that doesn't prevent people from getting covid or getting long covid, it just reduces the likelihood of severe adverse effects like hospitalization and death. So I still take full precautions, both because I don't want to catch covid and inadvertently pass it to someone else and because I'm worried about the possibility of adverse effects even with the vaccine (especially long covid which doesn't yet seem to be well understood).