Which of these "covid view camps" do you fall into?

[Хahar 🤔]

Anyway I'm sorry, but I just don't see the psychological impact and social alienation of wearing a cloth mask. I get that facial expressions help communication, but frankly if you're at the point of weighing that against the health impact of COVID I think the comparison is absurd.

I don't see how the comparison is absurd at all. The ability that we have to recognize other people is powerful beyond belief. It's what lets us see faces on Mars. Recognizing and knowing other humans is fundamental to what makes us human. When we interact with others, non-verbal communication is just as important as verbal communication, and most of that nonverbal communication is in the face. Cutting off most of the face destroys that.

When I have advanced this argument elsewhere in the past, I've been met with the response that people can understand the emotions and feelings of people they know just fine even with a mask. Even if we suppose that to be the case, what about people they don't know? There is a reason that "faceless stranger" is practically a set phrase in English; without their faces, strangers hardly seem human. When you go into a crowd in a public place where everyone is wearing a mask, you find that you are not met with a single face. It is a perfectly faceless crowd.

At this time, our society is more atomized than it has been at any time in human history, and we find ourselves paying the price over and over. With social trust lower than ever, I find it inconceivable that forcing everyone to put up a fence between themselves and the world passes without a second thought.

I would ask you: what do you think of niqabs? I don't mean whether you think that wearing a niqab should be illegal; I just want to know how you feel about the practice of wearing that article of clothing. Personally I find it repulsive and abhorrent, because its purpose is to erect a barrier between its wearer and the world. It is, quite literally, a cloth mask. Why wouldn't cloth masks have that effect except that we don't want them to?

[Хahar 🤔]

One thing that is notable in Europe is that closing borders have been genuinely one of the measures that have had the least public acceptance, have come most to symbolise the societal impact of the restriction, and were both one of the earliest measures to be reversed while recent attempts to close borders have virtually all had to be almost immediately repealed because of the popular outrage. That is in stark contrast to the US happily keeping its borders shut to foreigners for 18 months, without causing anything like the same popular uproar that the comparatively minor measure of wearing a mask in the supermarket has

The reasons here are pretty obvious, aren't they? Americans live in an enormous country and have far less reason to cross international borders. Many Americans have family members who live abroad, but because those Americans are overwhelmingly immigrants, they are far likelier to travel abroad themselves than to have those family members visit them. Very few Americans are significantly inconvenienced by a policy that closes the border to foreigners.

I was unsure of the current policy, so I looked it up. It turns out that it was what I expected, in that vaccinated foreigners are free to enter the country; there is nothing like Australia's visa regime at present. I have no idea when this policy was implemented, because it was not of any particular interest. What I do know is that for the last year, a close friend of mine has claimed to be "working from home" while in fact he was working from half a dozen different countries in Latin America. Even as an American who frequently travels internationally, he was not significantly inconvenienced by travel restrictions.