The problem is, masks protect someone else from you. Your use of a mask prevents the virus laden droplets from escaping the webbing of your mask. It is these droplets that transmit the virus. If you think your heavy feeling in your lungs is due to vaping and not the virus or, some other insignificant reason, you might be mistaken. You might might cough or sneeze in the store, leaving a vapor cloud with the virus to contaminate the surrounding shelves of merchandise. All it takes is once. It is the same precaution you use when driving your car through an intersection. Every time you look both ways before you proceed. All it takes is one time not to look.
MASKS! Folks, let a surgeon of 30 years (a.k.a. me) teach you about MASKS. COVID 19 virus particle size averages 125 nanometers (0.125 microns); the range is 0.06 microns to .14 microns; one needs an electron microscope to see a COVID 19 virus particle. The hoarded N 95 mask filters down to 0.3 microns. So, N95 masks block few, if any, virions (virus particles). This is a simple fact, so you just cannot argue against it. Other surgical masks, home-made masks and kerchiefs do the following: 1) the(y) allow free passage both ways (in and out) of COVID 19 virions. 2) they become warm, damp or moist reservoir of COVID 19 particles in asymptomatic "carriers" (estimated to be 85% of all people tested). For surgeons, years of training, intimidation, and humiliation teach us to touch NOTHING but our surgical field. Lay people constantly touch, re-arrange, and manipulate their "masks", wonderfully inoculating thousands of virus particles onto their bare or (even worse, gloved) hands. So, these absurd masks ENCOURAGE the fomite transmission ('infected" articles-to-hand-to face transmission of the virus). So, go ahead and allow idiots to delude and mislead you to the false sense of security--and danger--of masks!
---Doc Graham (his Facebook account)