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Preface: This is absolutely not an "I told you so" for anyone dealing with wildfire smoke for the first time.

I continue to be dismayed at how as a larger society we keep having opportunities to improve everybody's well being through mitigations to improve air quality and we continue to fail to do it systematically.

Prior to the pandemic I would stand by baffled at how local health officials would discourage mask usage. Air filtration wasn't discouraged so much as just not talked about. Except in small circles amongst people already affected by poor air quality (e.g. I have autoimmune issues and a chronic cough.) Such a wasted practice for the pandemic that would later hit us. Where, again, folks were discouraged from masking and where we again failed to making collective efforts to vastly improve indoor air quality for everyone a priority. IMO, everyone who had already been living in wildfire areas should already have been stocked with N95s and indoor air filtration.

And now it's happening all over again. As far as I'm concerned, every household and business should already have air purification/filtration systems capable of handing both respiratory pathogens and pollutants. There's no reason not to mobilize to do this other than we apparently no longer have a social contract with our government b/c fucking billionaires control everything.