I'm 23 years old, been in the community for 2 years, and been doing cold approaches for about a month (still waste a lot of time walking around anxiously not approaching in full honesty) and have had 1 start-to-finish pull and some pretty close pulls. I'm pretty charismatic to start, and I also utilize and pay for a dating coach in my community, but I still make big errors here and there so I'm not the greatest, closer to intermediate level. I can just address some concerns for people that want to do approaches nowadays:

A couple of really valuable tips I've picked up:

(A) Escalation can be done safely. Don't take girls' safety for granted. Not wearing a mask makes you seem socially uncalibrated. Don't physically escalate until plenty of comfort has been built. They may have families they go back to that are immunocompromised. Yeah, you're less attractive when your mouth and jaw are tucked away, and you can't display non-verbal cues as well without facial expressions. To compensate, put some power into your tonality and eye contact to compensate for the mask, focus on and make them a defined part of your approach.

(B) "I just got my test results back, thankfully I'm clean": Get yourself tested regularly and let the girl you're approaching know about it. Doesn't mean you can physically escalate, because she doesn't know you, you could be lying, but definitely shows social awareness and puts you in a better situation than not acknowledging it.

(C) Verbal Escalation. Half your face is missing, and you can't physically escalate. Verbal escalation, verbal escalation, verbal escalation. Here's a good time to just work on something I like to call Basic Escalation Model (BEM), which is Escalate --> normal conversation --> escalate --> normal conversation --> etc. Examples: "You're cute. What brings you to Portland?" "I don't know if we'd work together. Have you been to the new cake shop in town?"