This afternoon, I met up with a friend and his wife for our first catchup since I’d last seen them in early March. For the first few months of the pandemic, no one felt comfortable meeting up, but now that it’s been a while and things are starting to open up, we finally decided to meet up at a park… with our masks on.

I really feel for people who have pre-existing conditions or who easily fall ill. My friend once suffered really extreme pneumonia when he was in college, and it was apparently so bad that he nearly developed a hole in his lung. Since then, he’s been scarred by the experience and takes extra precautions with everything, including COVID-19. His wife recently got diagnosed with asthma, and she gets sick very easily (and from what he said, pretty often), so they’ve been quite risk-averse since the virus took over the world. They refuse to take any form of public transport, and they won’t even go to the grocery store and are nearly completely relying on grocery delivery and food delivery for food. When we met up, he said he was more comfortable if we sat with our masks on, so I complied.

When will the world be “normal” again in the sense that friends can meet up without masks on?