It certainly makes a fashion statement for the times we live in.
It's interesting. I wore this all the time until I got vaccinated, in stores. Never got any comments back then, through early 2021. Went to N95 after that (with the exception of the holiday party and a brief low spread period pre-Delta in rock climbing gym, I've not removed the N95), didn't think I was bringing it back. I was wrong.
Now that things are the worst they've ever been (in terms of risk of infection), when I wear it, I get comments (complementary comments, nearly universally). And I went into an O'Reilly's (where no one was wearing masks, and everyone was talking about how their friends had gotten COVID
) and there appeared to be a lot of snickering. And then they complemented my mask at checkout.
My conclusion is that now that people are vaccinated and boosted (if they want), people have concluded (probably correctly) that such protections are unnecessary, whereas before it was completely understandable with no vaccine that such protection was appropriate. So before they didn't want to comment or talk about it, but now they feel it is somewhat overkill and just think it's amusing? Or maybe now that things are so bad they actually do think it is great, and so they say so? Hard to say.
But, I don't want to get infected (mostly because my wife doesn't want to get infected and I wouldn't live that down), so here we are.
I'm under the impression that in my particular situation with no kids, that it's extremely easy to avoid infection with Omicron. Lots of doom & gloom yesterday from Fauci and FDA about how nearly everyone is getting it, but I'm not concerned about infection (unless there is an unexpected hospital visit or whatever). Upset my wife though. Everyone just needs to calm down. We'll have at least 10x less risk in just a few weeks (at most 6 weeks I think). People who don't care should just go out and get it, everyone else just needs to chill. I know it's much harder with kids and other required contacts (my work told me we had to come in and I told them I wasn't going to, which they were fine with - that's going to be interesting to see that play out - I'd wear the P100 if I did go into the office though).
www.cnn.com
