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Indoor Masks: Why Italians Didn’t Really Say Goodbye

“I continue to use it, for safety, at least in closed places.” The answer is almost always this to the question asked to those who still wear the mask in places where there is no longer the obligation from May 1st. The indoor masks they are no longer mandatory everywhere, but not all Italians have decided to leave them at home. In supermarkets, 90% of customers take them from Rome to Milan, at least judging from what we saw in the first days of freedom.

To bring the Italians to keep the mask are a set of factors. “A habit acquired in two years of consecutive attention due to obligation, it cannot be canceled in a day ”, he explains Anna Maria Giannini, head of the emergency psychology working group of the Lazio Psychologists’ Order. All the more reason for the fact that «this habit, however painful and tiring it may be, is linked to health protection“.

The second factor is related to the communication: it has been said that indoor masks are not mandatory, but the contagion is there. Anyone who has experience of positive cases and the media channels report contagion data. “This information, direct and indirect, leads us to think that the mask is held in doubt”.

To these two general and transversal factors there are the individual ones. «It depends on the individual approach to security procedures: there are people more anxious and less” confident “who keep it in doubt. It would be more emotionally costly for them to take it off. It is not such a big inconvenience doing the cost-benefit account “explains the psychologist.

According to the professor it depends a lot on places. Crowded situations where people don’t know each other are more scary. The supermarket is one of them. The measures where there are known people are loosened.

“People have got hold of the idea that a given situation is dangerous or that it requires protection, extra attention. The mask is automatically put on when you find yourself in these situations. There is a lot of weight of the personal factor with an extremity between those who flaunt the farewell to the mask and those who no longer intend to take it off. It will take some time to eliminate the extremism in the use or not of the mask, but I am not sure that we will completely eliminate the use ».

Other stories of Vanity Fair that may interest you:

– Sense of loneliness and few friendships: the post-Covid malaise of young people

– The best rapid anti-Covid tests to do at home

Source: Vanity Fair

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