YMMV / Let's Speak English

• Harsher in Hindsight: The strip for 24/02/2016 is about the vital importance — as well as the social convention — of wearing a face mask in Japan if you suspect you are ill, so as not to spread anything contagious in a densely populated country. Up until the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic in early 2020, this was seen as a Weird Far Eastern Thing that had to be patiently explained to Westerners and was taken as proof that the Japanese are impossibly weird, alien, and uptight^note widespread mask-wearing in the West had previously been commonplace during The Spanish Flu, but that was already almost a century old by the strip's publication and was scarcely remembered outside of the medical community and history buffs.

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