MANDATORY FACE MASKS
Hanes: What’s the holdup?
Let’s face it: wearing a mask outdoors in a heat wave isn’t much fun. It can slip down if it doesn’t fit right. It’s hot. It’s hard to breathe. And it muffles speech.
Yet donning these swatches of colourful fabric — at least indoors and in crowded public spaces — may be the key to maintaining something resembling normal life as the coronavirus lingers.
The thinking in Quebec on wearing masks to reduce the transmission of COVID -19 has evolved almost as much as the pandemic since March.
At first, Dr. Horacio Arruda, Quebec’s director of public health, was against any such requirement, fearing it would provide a false sense of security.
Then it was a waste of precious resources best reserved for frontline health workers.
In May, both Arruda and Premier François Legault started showing up at their daily press briefing wearing masks and were “strongly encouraging ” Quebecers to don them while shopping or taking public transit.
Legault even started showing off his collection of handmade face coverings and giving a shout-out to the citizens who sent them to him.
Despite the emergence of a homegrown cottage industry in mask manufacturing, Quebec has stopped short of making them mandatory even though there’s a growing list of organizations, businesses and jurisdictions that have done so, from Côte-st-luc to California.
Arruda’s most recent position is that he prefers to “convince rather than constrain” mask wearing. Quebec’s lack of official rules on when masks must be worn translates into ambivalence among the general public. Anecdotally, only a fraction of people actually put one on to go about their business.
A recent poll showed just 42 per cent of Quebecers wear masks regularly, versus 70 per cent who socially distance.
Now that summer has arrived, Quebec is deconfining, and the number of COVID -19 cases are dropping. Perhaps people don’t see the urgency. Wearing a mask — and remembering to bring it — does take some getting used to. But where required, people manage fine.
Getting a desperately needed trim at recently reopened hairdressers necessitates it. Air Canada and Via Rail now require passengers to cover their faces. Ottawa’s OC Transpo became the first public transit system in Canada to make masks mandatory, and the Toronto Transit Commission is following suit.
Quebec seems to be coming up with every excuse in the book to avoid making masks compulsory. No one wants to punish the disadvantaged people who can’t access or afford protection. But Legault coughed up $6 million to help transit agencies, including the Société de transport de Montréal, purchase and distribute masks. That operation has been completed, but masks still aren’t compulsory. What’s the holdup now?
Mask wearing has become politicized, an identity marker dividing those taking COVID-19 seriously versus those who think the pandemic was overblown.
The government’s laissez-faire attitude only fuels phenomena like “mask shaming” by both the pro and the anti camps.
It’s true, there is still no scientific consensus on the effectiveness of masks. But there is a preponderance of evidence showing they are a useful tool to curb transmission. A group of local doctors has called for them to be compulsory in indoor public settings.
Masks don’t replace handwashing or keeping a safe social distance. They don’t protect the wearer from contagion so much as others from the wearer.
Yet, however imperfect, requiring them in places like supermarkets and on buses is a low-risk way to lower transmission of COVID -19. It’s certainly preferable to draconian alternatives like shuttering the economy, closing schools and confining citizens.
It’s also an easily reversible measure if we discover a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19. In the meantime, it’s a small sacrifice to make.
It also makes more sense to get people accustomed to wearing them while the rates of infection are low, not once a second wave hits.
Leaving mask wearing to common sense doesn’t generate compliance. Only clearly defined rules change behaviour and attitudes.
At this point, the question is not should we make masks mandatory, but why shouldn’t we?