Accident costs unmasked
As an accident-prone member of the four-eyed community, wearing a mask has kept me safe from Covid19 but put me in danger of injury. Many in the myopic masses will be familiar with the daily battle with lens fog as breath billows from the mask to gather and condense on glasses above. The resulting fog is often experienced while walking, and is a natural magnet for lampposts, potholes, parking meters and other obstructions.
I’ve had a few close shaves with disaster in the past couple of years but thankfully avoided injury. Now it turns out others haven’t been so lucky.
Out of curiosity, I asked ACC to tell me how many claims it had received in the past two years for injuries as a result of vision being affected by the wearing of a mask as protection against Covid-19.
Quite a few, as it happens. New claims for injuries caused by mask use jumped from 97 in 2019 to 106 in 2020, to 225 in 2021. A curve so steep you could fall down it.
The costs of treating those injuries rose too: from $47,064 to $190,734 to $216,801. Small change or reasonable dosh, depending on your point of view.
Lacerations/punctures/stings (70) and soft tissue injuries (68) made up the bulk of the claims, with the eyes (ouch) and the face suffering the most injuries.
In fact, there were 57 claims for eye injuries last year related to mask wearing – more than double for faces. Strangely, masks were a factor in 14 dental injuries.
Not surprisingly, Aucklanders suffered the most injuries (62), with Wellington a distant runnerup (26). People in Tasman and the West Coast, perhaps blessed with better coordination, luck, or a combination of both, didn’t record any injuries at all.
ACC was at pains to point out that, while it had searched for the words ‘‘mask’’ and ‘‘face mask’’ and excluded words not linked with Covid, such as ‘‘asbestos’’ and ‘‘construction’’, there were limitations with the data. Therefore, the claims and costs should be considered as ‘‘indicative only, and should not be used as a representation of claims for mask injuries due to Covid-19’’.
Point taken. But I figured that, in a trend so pronounced, Covid masks had to have played a part. Why else would mask-related injuries while walking or running – the most common injury scenario – rise over the past three years from less than four, to six, to 37 in 2021?
I suspected many of these claims were lamppost-related, and said so in a follow-up request for a breakdown of the 37, which for reasons known only to itself, ACC decided to treat as an Official Information Act request.
Regular readers of Stuff newspapers will know that Official Information Act requests are not always a guarantee of success. But being the good sports they are, ACC’S staff went through each one of those claims by hand to find the answers (my thanks and apologies to these unsung heroes, you know who you are).
Eight claims were directly a result of fogged glasses (I knew it). Ten blamed obscured vision from a mask (same diff). Eleven were a result of a person becoming distracted while taking off a mask (focus, people). Most intriguingly, eight people were injured while simply fetching a mask. A lesser man than I might chuckle at the irony.
So what have I learned, other than you can get anything in life if you ask nicely? Well, masks undoubtedly helped keep us safe from Covid for the past two years. But a number of people paid a painful price for protection. And yes, that cost the public purse a few hundred grand, although only a curmudgeon would begrudge that.
Claims will no doubt plummet now mask requirements have been dropped. Maybe I’ll ask ACC about that next year. But for now I, and many others, no longer have an excuse for walking into that parking meter.
Simon Bradwell is a former journalist who works in public relations. He has worn glasses for 40 years.