Masks

 After almost twenty months of mask requirements, I can make four observations from here in Germany:

1.  From the fifteen-odd brands that my wife and I have procured (either bought, or gotten via her place of work)....I will say that three were of extremely high quality, two were of dismal and unacceptable quality and the rest in between (acceptable).  

I bought some batch of five that simply didn't fit.  It didn't matter how you pulled the draw-string....these were made in some crappy way, with no emphasis on quality.  I bought another set of twenty-odd masks which were a decent price but were made of some inferior material.  

There just wasn't a lot of control over the mask industry, or audits done to take some masks off the market.

2.  Masks laying around parking lots.  About a month or two into forcing people to wear masks indoors....you started to notice masks laying on the ground of parking lots.  

As bad as it got in 2020....it's twice that bad now.  I probably walk through various grocery parking lots and note at least five to ten on each trip now.  

3.  Since spring of 2020....I've probably come across 20,000-odd Germans with the mask on.  Out of every ten guys that I come across....one will be wearing the mask in the wrong fashion (below the nose, ill-fitted and allowing air in, or just too loose).  On women, it's probably one out of every forty.  

Why the difference....male to female?  Unknown.  Maybe guys really don't care about the fit....it's just the wear that matters.

4.  Suspicion of long-term wear of a single mask?  Well....you'd hate to ask this.....to find that one guy out of a hundred is still wearing the same mask that he bought from six months ago.  Generally, the experts say a typical mask is made for a eight-hour shift.  For a retiree who only needs it for grocery or medical trips....one mask probably can survive a week of wear.   

5.  Finally, it's just painfully obvious that 99.9-percent of all masks....are Chinese-made.  I've even come to note various attempts to 'suggest' to you a German-product, with a German name on the package....with even a German address of the key developer/maker....but obviously have the 'made in China' note somewhere on the box.