Y'all I'm going to KEEP repeating this because literal lives are at stake.

The data from 1918 AND the growing data from 2020 show that only wearing your mask in public wont stop the spread. You need to mask in private gatherings of friends/families too http://a.msn.com/01/en-us/BB1a0lSd?ocid=st

The biggest mistake we can make right now is to incorrectly balance our scales of risk when trying to rank which activities are safer or more dangerous.

While you may *feel* like strangers in public pose a far greater risk to you, and that you "know" your family and friends and can "trust" them more? The science shows clearly that this is a trick of misperception. You are far more likely to be exposed to Covid by someone you know

Covid exposure is much more likely when you spend a longer amount of time interacting with someone - so sharing coffee at your kitchen table with a friend is inherently riskier than passing someone in a grocery store aisle.

Covid exposure is much more likely when you are spending time in closer physical proximity to people - and we naturally feel more comfortable letting friends/families into our bubble of personal space than we do with strangers.

Covid exposure is much more likely when you drop your guard and stop paying attention to your prevention strategies - your heightened awareness of potential danger you feel in a busy grocery store reminds you to be safe, but your natural comfort with your...

... family/friends (ESPECIALLY when in a familiar environment like your own home) literally tells your brain it's ok to take a much needed rest and shut down that extra work for awhile.

In public we remind ourselves that any of these strangers could be symptomatic or awaiting a test result after a known exposure and could be "selfishly" exposing people anyways. But in private, with people we know well, we assume that obviously if someone here was...

...positive they would have told us - forgetting that people are most contagious BEFORE they show any symptoms, and that any one of our closest loved ones could unknowingly expose us no matter how careful we *feel* like they've been. (...)

(...) More importantly, we most easily forget WE could be the one that is presymptomatic right now - and that WE could be the ones who infect our beloveds because we didn't take precautions.

Does it feel awkward and uncomfortable to wear a mask with our parents or best friend? Sure. Do we sometimes worry we might insult people with even the insinuation we don't "trust" them enough? I don't deny it.

But...

But our feelings of discomfort or awkwardness now would be utterly dwarfed by the weight of knowing we accidentally exposed our loved ones to this virus - especially if they were to die.

I know people think I'm "extremist." I know people roll their eyes and think this is "over the top." But no matter how we *feel* about this, the facts don't change.

We're living in a global pandemic, something none of us have any personal lived experience with, so most of our feelings about how things "should be" are based on our experiences in a non-pandemic world.

We need to adapt our perceptions of what is reasonable/unreasonable to catch up to this new post-pandemic world we find ourselves in.

The lives of our loved ones quite literally depend on it.

Since this thread is starting to get shared a bunch, I wanted to link this previous thread has links to articles and data on the problem with only masking in public. The data from 1918 gave us such a clear picture, it’s sad to see us repeating the same mistakes. https://twitter.com/stephtaitwrites/status/1276583870041690112