Sounds like you had a bad time last fall and I don't blame you for not wanting to get sick again.  However, considering that it was in November combined with the severity and duration of your illness, I suspect you had pneumonia.  That can be brutal.  There's a reason it kills over 5 million people every year in the US.  I had it a few years ago and didn't want to go through that again either, so I got a PPSV23 vaccine (Pneumovax) before starting my hospital rotation.  I would suggest getting that to protect yourself if you're worried about getting sick.  It will protect you from 23 different strains of pneumonia. As for the masks, they're not as effective as you think.  I really wish they could stop the spread of viruses, but they can't.  Even surgical masks only reduce the amount of bacteria spread, not stop it completely.  For tuberculosis patients, we put patients in a negative pressure room and then use N95 masks to hopefully stop the bacteria from spreading, and even then it doesn't always work.  And that's for bacteria.  A virus is less than 1/1000th the size of a bacterium, so there's no chance that the mask is going to work.  Not to mention that the virus can also be contracted through the surface of the eye. The sad truth is that the media and the government are lying to everyone about everything that's going on.  Masks won't stop Covid from spreading.  The new cases and deaths are hugely inflated and don't even come close to reflecting the reality of the situation.  Over 80% of people that catch it don't even have symptoms.  Of the remaining 20%, most cases are extremely mild and resemble a cold.  The severe cases and "unexpected" deaths you see on the news are people that have underlying health conditions or secondary infections.  For example, if a patient has both tuberculosis and Covid and dies, the death will be reported as Covid even though it's likely the TB that killed him.  Patients are checked post mortem for the virus and if they have it, the death is instantly recorded as Covid.  I've seen it happen for alcohol poisoning, car accidents and heart attacks. <  ffa  p>Our hospital's epidemiologist is calling bullshit but isn't getting anywhere because hospitals receive government funding for every patient they report with coronavirus.  Since the hospitals have been stopped from performing any "elective" procedure, they're trying to bring in more money by inflating their numbers.  And for the record, these fucking asshole politicians have decided that everything is elective.  We have cancer patients that can't even receive chemo because that's now considered an elective procedure.  This has gotten so out of hand that hospitals are laying off employees in droves because there's nothing for them to do and the hospitals can't afford to pay them anymore. How do you know when a politician is lying?  His lips are moving.