Maskless
The province has rescinded its mask mandate, and boy have people taken it to heart. Yesterday I was walking downtown and I saw a restaurant packed full of maskless people breathing on each other. The first couple of days after the mandate a majority of people at the junk food store were masked (and several of the ones who weren't were causing drama in other ways) but today over half didn't bother. Similarly many of the people at the Farmer's Market were unmasked.
Like an idiot, I did not double-mask when shopping. Now I am anxious that I caught something. I continue to mask when indoors, even though my big bushy homeless beard renders the mask even more useless than masks already are.
I do not like this development. We are currently in a lull with respect to infection rates, but there are still infections and hospitalizations every day. There may or may not be another wave coming with the Omicron B.2 variant that is tearing through Europe, but it is clear that the province has decided that if we stop measuring things then nothing bad will happen. With the war in Ukraine, there has been a lot less coverage of COVID.
I suspect Doug Ford has made a decision that this pandemic is over, and that he will be extremely reluctant to impose mask mandates or shutdowns before the June election, regardless of whether there is another wave and regardless of whether the new wave is a bad one. That means we are on our own, and that means it is more dangerous for me to go junk food shopping than it was before. As far as I know I have not yet been hit by the virus, but the time bomb is ticking. I firmly believe that many people (including much of my social circle) contracted the virus via school transmission. Now with things opening up further, it is only a matter of time until I succumb. In the meantime my health anxieties are becoming unmanageable.