You should think of it more like cigarette smoke.

If you're standing next to a smoker, you'll likely breathe in a lot of their secondhand smoke.

If you're a few feet further, you might smell the smoke but not get a big hit.

Further and you won't even smell it https://twitter.com/fuckjadaindigo/status/1313335827729088512

There are many people smoking outdoors at any given point. But this doesn't mean anyone who goes outside will smell cigarettes.

If however people are indoors smoking, it gets smelly and smoky fast and anyone in the space is gonna inhale a lot of smoke.

Masks are like air purifiers.

They pull in the air with all the little smoke particles but the bits get trapped in the filters so the air coming through has much less of the bad stuff in it.

Just like with smoke, how much you take in matters.

A casual whiff may not do much. But being in a smoke-filled environment day after day will have health effects.

Avoid the virus like you would if you were allergic to cigarette smoke.

As anyone who smokes or lives with smokers knows, smoke is really lots of tiny little bits of burnt cigarette which stay in the air for a while, but will eventually fall out of the air and land on everything.

The Covid virus is similar. It blows in the air awhile and falls out.

Speaking to someone without a mask is roughly equivalent then with taking a drag of your cigarette and exhaling directly in someone's face.

The distance one should keep in a social situations during Covid is roughly the same distance a considerate smoker would take around a group of nonsmokers.

If you think about how long it takes to clear out a smoky room, you should have a good sense of how long it takes before a room that just had a bunch of Covid-positive people in it is safe to breathe in.

The big difference here is that smokers, even chain smokers have tend to have periods of time when they're not smoking.

Someone who is Covid-positive is breathing ALL the time.

And their "cigarettes" are invisible.

You can try to tell them by their cough, but many just don't.

Because you can't tell Covid-positive people from Covid-negative people, we therefore need to treat people in general as if they are positive.

Treat everyone in public spaces as if you are a smoker and they are allergic.