The Evermaskers: The isolation of people who take precautions against COVID has only gotten more intense.

Archive link: [https://archive.ph/VtO8j](https://archive.ph/VtO8j)

“It breaks my brain sometimes,” Dennis Rosloniec told me. For half a decade now, the 44-year-old media technician and mountain biker from Green Bay, Wisconsin, has done everything he can to understand the risks of getting COVID. He’s read the published studies. He’s looked at meta-analyses. And here’s the truth as far as he can tell: Each time he’s infected, the chances that something really bad will happen to his body ratchet up a little higher.

Dennis is not immunocompromised. He doesn’t have a chronic illness. He’s not obese or hypertensive or unvaccinated. He’s just a thoughtful autodidact, the kind of guy who references both *The Simpsons* and the Stoics as he talks. “I’m a fairly large, fit, white dude, for lack of a better term,” he said. But even now, in 2025, Dennis Rosloniec is afraid of COVID. Someone else might say he’s strangely so.

Dennis is still masking quite a bit. He’s wary of attending indoor social gatherings unless they seem especially important. And he’s been taking sundry extra measures to protect himself, based on fledgling research that he’s either heard about or read online, since 2020, when he bought a tube of ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that was repurposed as a [highly suspect COVID treatment](https://archive.ph/o/VtO8j/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/10/ivermectin-research-problems/620473/), “out of anxiety” while awaiting the vaccines. Later on, he tried iota-carrageenan nasal spray, which he used as a hedge against COVID infection until “the science became sort of iffy on it.” These days, he keeps a bottle of cetylpyridinium-chloride mouthwash in his desk, so he can gargle when he thinks he might have been exposed. And he’s got a prophylactic nasal rinse, which, actually, he’s come to sort of like for reasons that don’t have much to do with COVID. “I breathe better through my nose when I use it.”

As a masker—and as a mouthwash guy and a nasal-rinser—Dennis knows he’s out of step with almost everyone he sees in person. “You feel pressure from the world,” he told me. “It makes you question, *Is this really worth it?*” But he also knows that certain others share his sense of caution, or even worry more than he does. He interacts with them online, on message boards for “COVID conscious” conversation. Theirs is a kind of shadow world where the fears and obligations felt by everyone in early 2020 never really went away, and lockdowns still persist in private.