Meet the Forever Maskers

There exists today, in 2025, a small group of people still fanatically obsessed with COVID-19. They think national governments, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Health Organisation are conspiring to hide the truth about the pandemic. They have lost trust in mainstream scientific research, and instead do their own research on wacky cures and remedies. 

These people are not ‘far-right,’ anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists, as you might expect. Rather, they are convinced that the COVID-19 pandemic never ended.

Years after the last lockdown measures were lifted, since the daily press briefings stopped, and since the posters instructing us how to properly wash our hands were quietly taken down, for a small, committed group, the pandemic goes on. These are the ‘forever maskers’—people who continue to wear their N95 masks in public, refuse to meet friends and family indoors, and disinfect every item they touch.

You may have come across them on social-media sites like X, berating others whom they deem to be less virtuous than they are, for not abiding by these insane, self-imposed rules. They insist that the pandemic isn’t over, that it will never be over, and that not taking the ‘right’ precautions could literally kill you or your loved ones.

One of the strangest things about the forever maskers is that many of them are not elderly, disabled, or immunocompromised. One man, called Dennis, who spoke to the Atlantic back in April, admitted that he was a perfectly healthy, vaccinated, 44-year-old man. For some reason, though, Dennis chooses to live his life as though it were 2020. He doesn’t go to indoor social gatherings “unless they seem especially important,” gargles cetylpyridinium-chloride mouthwash whenever he feels he’s been exposed to the virus, and religiously uses a prophylactic nasal rinse. This kind of behaviour is surprisingly common in the world of the forever maskers. This, despite the fact that evidence for the effectiveness of these measures is pretty scant. In an ironic twist, the same people who once accused the lockdown sceptics of being ‘anti-science’ are now rejecting mainstream public-health guidance themselves. Much of this thinking even takes on a conspiratorial tone. One man, named Alex, told Time magazine in March last year that he lost faith in the CDC after it declared the pandemic over. He felt it was “trying to present it like we can go back to normal when we can’t.” Now, he says, there are “very few” experts he can trust. Dennis even wonders aloud: “It makes you question, is this really worth it?”

Most people would answer a resounding “no” to this. But for Dennis, Alex, and many others like them, this has become a way of life. Unable or afraid to venture outside too often, they congregate mostly in online forums, like r/zerocovidcommunity on Reddit, and on X. In fact, according to a recent Pew Research survey, roughly 4% of Americans are still regularly wearing masks in public—equating to about 13 million people.

Not all of them take it to the extremes, of course, and plenty are simply sick people taking precautions to not get sicker. But it is on these online forums that the truly deranged members of this community can be found. On the aforementioned subreddit, members share stories about how being “COVID conscious,” as they call it, has essentially ruined their lives. One user complained about the strain that living this way put on their previous relationship. Another poster described how they avoided visiting the dentist for years, terrified of COVID, only to discover their teeth were starting to fall out. Someone else even refused to drink water on a five-and-a-half-hour flight out of fear of lifting up their mask—they ended up with a blood clot, which they believe was a result of dehydration.

Most of the stories, however, complain about how difficult it is to continue living their COVID-cautious lives when everyone around them is continuing on as normal. They talk about how hard it is to explain to their kids why they can’t go to friends’ birthday parties or, in some cases, go to school altogether. Or how they refuse to visit family members and friends who won’t take PCR tests beforehand. They are not content just making these bizarre decisions for themselves—they insist on subjecting the rest of us to them, too.

When children are involved, forever masking and staying ‘zero COVID’ becomes particularly tricky. Kids are, after all, little vectors of disease, and schools are breeding grounds for all kinds of bugs and sicknesses. In some rare, horrific cases, parents deathly afraid of COVID have decided to isolate their children from the world altogether. In May this year, three children were discovered in Spain in what the media has dubbed a “house of horrors.” The children—twins aged eight and an older brother aged ten—were kept inside by their parents, a German couple, out of fear they would catch COVID. When police entered the house, they found that the boys were forced to wear nappies, sleep in caged beds, and did not go to school. They weren’t allowed to go outside at all, and they were made to wear three masks on top of one another before leaving the house with police officers. The parents are now facing child abuse charges and could face prison sentences of between five and seven years. 

In what might be an even more grim case, a Dutch man living in Italy was discovered last month to be hiding his two children—aged six and nine—in isolation in the woods. The father had apparently hidden his children away out of fear of COVID, turning their home into a kind of bunker. The siblings were found to be still wearing nappies and could not read, write, or even speak—despite the father insisting he was homeschooling them.

These cases are obviously extreme outliers, and there are more factors at play here than simply being ‘COVID conscious.’ But they underscore just how far down the rabbit hole this kind of thinking can go. What begins as caution can, in some cases, end up in a complete detachment from reality. Isolated in their online communities and cut off from people who might disagree with them in the real world, it’s easy to see how the forever maskers can become even more radicalised.

In a way, it’s tough to blame the forever maskers for their strange behaviour. After all, our governments spent the best part of two years telling us that COVID really was a deadly plague, which would kill us if we so much as stepped outside without at least two masks. That no matter your age, health, or previous lifestyle choices, the virus was just as likely to kill or disable you—potentially for years, if not forever. We were warned that going about our lives normally could “kill granny.” We faced huge billboards plastered with images of people on ventilators, whose deaths we would presumably be responsible for if we didn’t follow the very specific and ever-changing social-distancing rules.   

Of course, if people want to take precautions—especially if they’re immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable—for themselves, that’s entirely their prerogative. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us should be subject to infinite lockdowns. A culture that can’t let go of fear and that prizes anxiety as a virtue will struggle to ever recover. At some point, accepting a certain amount of risk becomes necessary to function as a free and open society. Living in fear is no way to live at all.