This photo is from 2015, at an urgent care office at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. I remember seeing it at the time and thinking "hey, wearing a mask when you're sick is a great idea, I'm glad it's getting normalized". Why did I think that? Because I visited Japan for work in the late 2000s and saw that lots of people were wearing masks on public transit. At the time I thought "that's funny, why are they doing that?" and asked my host about it, and he explained it's common practice to reduce disease transmission in high-density environments.
Thus when it first looked like COVID might come to the US, the idea of using masks to deal with the spread of disease was already very familiar, and I ran out and bought a pile of masks for my house.
This is why it's great to travel and visit other cultures. You see other ways of approaching life and society, and you take those lessons home with you.
Thanks, mask emoji with surprisingly strong mascara! Japan invented emoji as well -- emoji comes from: e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’. 😷