I agree that it would suck to die of it now.
I'm not convinced that getting a tube down your throat is the way to get better; the medical community quietly admitted that during the early months of this thing the accepted treatment of turning the ventilators up to max was probably doing as much harm as good. That's not a critique on people who practice medicine, practicing medicine isn't always as simple as "for symptom A prescribe treatment #1, symptom B do #2" and that's especially true for a new disease, but it's a real facepalm moment in the healthcare industry and it kinda puts last spring's "we're gonna run out of ventilators" panic in perspective, or how "pronating" greatly improved patients' oxygenation levels- medical speak for laying on your front instead of your back makes it easier to breathe- did it really take years of medical school to figure this one out?? What's also crystal clear for months now is that our fatass-worshipping society brought a lot of this pain on our collective selves. Newsflash- fat people can get out of breath laying down, not just walking up stairs, and with a disease that kills people by making it hard to breathe you don't need to be an MD to figure out that making fat choices hurts your odds.
There are a lot of innocent people caught in between, the immunocompromised for things like cancer treatment is one obvious example. Immunocompromised people who have a disease that you get from recreational drug use or fat people who grew up in a family of couch potatoes who ate junk food, a lot of that is self-inflicted but at the same time I do have humanitarian sympathy in the sense that we're all products of our environments and that nobody has control over when or where they were born or what they've suffered through (addictions are diseases as much as they are bad life choices, bad diet and exercise has a lot to do with childhood even if there are good examples and role models all around you in adulthood) and so on- life's complicated.
Personally, I don't laugh at the face shield plus respirator people or when I see someone in a tyvek suit at the airport. That's their business and they're not hurting me. Places of business that have a mask rule and choose to enforce it, that's the proprietor's prerogative as far as I'm concerned- my freedom to follow it and come in or to ignore it and go somewhere else.
Speaking of life is complicated, the vulnerable population has had over a year now to figure out how to adapt and better protect themselves. The mask-optional businesses are going to outnumber the mandatory mask places, hopefully sooner rather than later.
