One of the most annoying aspects of the public response to COVID was the insane attitude some people insisted on taking toward social distancing. The one moment that has stayed with me is the young person I was walking toward on the sidewalk in the winter a couple of years ago who scrambled so desperately to get off of the sidewalk and into the road — so she wouldn’t have to walk past me (insisting on keeping a distance of not 6 feet but over 12) — that she got her legs stuck in a snowbank and fell rather awkwardly. I was literally dumbstruck by this performance, and at the time referred to such people as “deeply disturbed.” I mean, by the time this happened it had been made abundantly clear that it was highly unlikely, if not impossible, to get COVID simply by walking past someone outdoors.

A couple of months later I had this to say in my COVID-19 post-mortem:

Even in the first months of the pandemic I never wore a mask outside, thinking just on the grounds of common sense that it was useless. I wasn’t going to get COVID just by walking past someone. And yet wearing a mask outdoors still seems to be a sort of virtuous fashion statement for many, even in the wee hours of the morning when there’s no one about, as does the annoying habit of running to the other side of a street to avoid passing someone on the sidewalk. This is taking hygiene theater to an extreme, and in a way that sends a confusing message. Are such people saying that they’re infected and that we should avoid them? I don’t think that’s what they mean, but it’s the most logical interpretation for their behaviour.

I wonder how much of this acting out will change in the months to come. In an earlier post I referred to the split between double-maskers and anti-maskers. Apparently there is another group known as ultra-maskers, who are defined as individuals who are going to continue to wear masks, everywhere, for the rest of their lives. This suggests a real mental illness.

Well, these people are still with us. Yesterday, while walking through the same neighbourhood I have every day for the last four or five years, I passed no fewer than three individuals who walked out into the road rather than have to share the sidewalk, ducking back onto the sidewalk once they were past me.

Two years later, I no longer see this as a mental illness so much as a way of performing an act of outrageous everyday rudeness. This was an opinion the woman I was with yesterday, a healthcare professional as it happens, heartily agreed with.

I can’t understand this behaviour. It is definitely a product of the COVID hysteria (and look, COVID was real and we all should have got vaccinated and worn masks indoors, but I’m talking about this kind of overreaction). It’s something I can’t remember I ever saw happening once in my entire life before the pandemic. Not only that, it’s now well known that such behaviour was never of much if any utility in avoiding infection in the first place. Pretty much the only way you could get COVID while outside was to stand in close proximity with someone who had it, while talking to them (or better, shouting at them) for an extended period of time. So maybe if you were packed into a crowd at a concert or sporting event. But even then the chances of transmission were said by experts to be exceedingly small.

So swerving out into the road is just meant to be an insult. It’s rude behaviour, shockingly rude in my opinion. Even worse, it looks as though it’s never going to stop. I mean, if these people are still at it now what would it take for them to ever go back to acting normally? They’ll never feel safe.