I went grocery shopping yesterday for the first time in three weeks. Half the people weren’t wearing masks, a good chunk of those that were didn’t have their masks over their noses, and one guy was wearing a crocheted mask.
As I was getting out of my car, the woman next to me left her car with her mask down around her chin as she smoked a cigarette.
People are so much fun.
I’ve always been told that the first rule of PPE is “if it’s comfortable you aren’t wearing it right”; while the second is “and if it’s uncomfortable you may well not be wearing it right.”
The whole point of “everyone wear a mask” isn’t to filter the air for the wearer, it’s to reduce the spray of droplets. To this point a bandanna probably is just as effective as a surgical mask.
Global warming is probably making them obsolete, but growing up in the Upper Midwest, I grew up wearing longjohns (insulated underwear that covers the legs as well as groin area) during winter. Those normally have flaps you can undo in the back because taking them off would be awkward.
That’s not as unreasonable as it sounds. The trade-off with masks is that if the resistance of the filtration material is too high, the air bypasses the mask and defeats the purpose. The surgical-style masks that most people thing of as medical masks are a great example. They are designed to allow incoming air from the sides for the person wearing them, while forcing outgoing breath to go through the mask material. The N95 masks that are desirable for front-line medical use during the pandemic have a seal around the area of the mouth and nose that helps ensure all the incoming and outgoing air travels through filtration material. If the resistance of the filtration material of an N95 mask gets too high, then the air bypasses the mask and is no longer functional.
For homemade masks, choose a material (as @ejeffrey entions) with a tight weave but that allows fairly effortless airflow. If you have to change the force of your breathing when you’re using it, most of the airflow probably isn’t going through the mask.
If she smoked the cig next to her car in the outside lot, then put the mask back up before entering the store, that seems not unreasonable to me.
The material in the instance I’m thinking of wasn’t a thin material with a tight weave, but something more akin to sheer blinds. Once someone pointed it out to them they sheepishly acknowledged the error. But at this point I’m pretty sure we’ve all seen a huge number of ridiculous mask errors.
Oh, like a gauze material. Yeah, that’s not doing anything. Might as well use a lace doily.
So this video showed up on Reddit last week, and when it popped up then, it was denounced as being fake. Look at his stream, and you decide.
Woman shops with hole in her mask because it’s “easier to breathe"…
… for now.
Round 1 of Spot the Design Flaw:
Copper doesn’t hold an edge like steel? 
Here in Germany it’s currently mandatory to wear a mask inside the supermarket but not mandatory in the parking lot, because the latter doesn’t make a huge amount of sense anyway. So if people absolutely must smoke (nasty habit) it’s probably just as well if they do it in the parking lot.
Also here in Germany it’s technically illegal to wear a mask while driving a car – the statute in question stipulates that face coverings of any kind are not allowed for drivers, presumably so people will be recognisable when a speed camera takes their picture; passengers get to do what they like. People are wondering how thoroughly this will be enforced now we’re supposed to wear masks and are also supposed to wash our hands before putting them on as well as after taking them off again.
Outfit also comes with assless chaps.
To keep the bears away.
All chaps are assless, otherwise they’re just pants.
You must know a different subset of the gay community than I do. Assless chaps would absolutely not keep the bears away…quite. the opposite, in fact!
Partial points for that!
This is from an official police press release.
So, yes, you can wear a mask in your car in Germany. You can not combine it with a hat, cap, sunglasses or other coverings of head or eyes.
Is wearing hat while driving a car normally allowed in Germany?
