still not quite there, are we?

ROK Drop notes that South Korea is to end its indoor-mask mandate:

An indoor mask mandate, which has been in place for two years and three months in Korea, will end from 12:00 a.m., Jan. 30, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said Friday. But the authorities stressed that people will still be required to wear masks at high-risk facilities such as hospitals and on public transport. 

The announcement, which comes after three years since Korea confirmed its first case of the coronavirus, represents a major milestone in the government’s shift in its pandemic response to living with the virus.

So you've still got to wear your mask in subways, buses, and—presumably—taxis. Very little is changing, then. South Korea is having a very hard time letting go of masks despite the fact that masks have done little to nothing over the course of the pandemic. I acknowledge that masks can help prevent the spray of large droplets of saliva when a person sneezes or coughs, but masks do nothing for microparticles, which also shoot out when you sneeze or cough (the old "stop a mosquito with a chain-link fence" metaphor). Overall, masking has been a joke, lockdowns have been a joke, and vaccines have been a joke. Sure, I'll enjoy having a tiny bit more freedom, but what Korea really needs to do is pull an England and drop the mask mandate entirely. What politicians fear, though, is a sudden increase in the confirmed-infected numbers. This is ludicrous given how little correlation there's been between the infection rate and the mortality rate. In Korea, the latter rate has been under 1% this entire time. The people dying of COVID—the very old and those with severe comorbidities—are people who would have died, anyway, from some ailment or other. Korea is the last OECD country to have a mask mandate. This is getting ridiculous... and it's ridiculous to think that, even with the mandate gone, people will still continue to mask up for reasons of superstitious fear and social pressure. Come on, cowards—grow some balls.