Americans continue to squabble over wearing face masks
As images of people wearing surgical masks flashed across the screen, Morgan Freeman’s deep, soothing voice delivered a message to America: “When you wear a mask, you have my respect. Because your mask doesn’t protect you, it protects me.”
Using familiar actors, stirring background music and the arresting eyes of people peering out above their masks, a broad national ad campaign unveiled Thursday by New York state, once the center of the coronavirus pandemic, aimed to educate people about how covering their mouths and noses could save lives.
That it was needed at all — six months since the virus was first detected in the U.S. — speaks to the lingering fight about the use of masks. At local government meetings and in the checkout lines of big-box stores, Americans continue to wrestle over one of the simplest methods that health officials recommend for stopping the spread of the virus.
A wave of new mask requirements has been issued in the last few days amid surging cases in many parts of the country. Face coverings will be required at stores such as Walmart, Target and CVS and in a growing number of Republican-led states where governors once resisted such mandates.
More than half the states have issued statewide mask requirements, including Arkansas, where Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced a face covering requirement Thursday after previously taking a more hands-off approach. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, also issued a mask order Thursday after questioning whether such a mandate would be enforceable.
But there remains firm resistance in many circles, including from some Republican leaders who view mask requirements as a threat to personal liberty.
Shifting guidance
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who announced this week that he was suspending all local mask mandates, filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging the authority of leaders in Atlanta to require masks inside their city’s limits. As the mayor of Atlanta, the suit said, Keisha Lance Bottoms “does not have the legal authority to modify, change or ignore Gov. Kemp’s orders,” only to carry them out.
And in Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt said this week that he remained opposed to a mask order, even after he became the first governor known to test positive for the virus.
“You can’t pick and choose what freedoms you are going to give people,” Stitt said during the
Zoom call on which he announced his positive test.
Masks have been broadly accepted in many European and Asian countries. Britain and France issued nationwide mask orders for certain public places this week, joining a long list of nations that already required them.
But in the U.S., there was initially confusion and shifting guidance over masks. The issue became politicized when, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began urging Americans to wear face coverings, President Donald Trump stressed that the measure was voluntary and said he did not think he was “going to be doing it.” Trump publicly wore a mask for the first time Saturday.
Public health officials increasingly see masks as a powerful weapon against the virus, particularly after the World Health Organization acknowledged that the virus can be airborne, with tiny respiratory droplets able to linger in the air for hours. Masks can block dangerous respiratory droplets that would otherwise be spread by infected people, and universal mask wearing can help stop inadvertent transmission by people who are asymptomatic.
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday that if all Americans embraced rigorous mask wearing, the country could control the virus within one to two months.
The vast majority of Americans support wearing masks, polling suggests. According to a Gallup survey conducted online from June 29 to July 5, 72 percent of adults surveyed said they always or very often wore a mask when outside their homes, while 18 percent said they wore a mask rarely or never.
Clashing views
But in some conservative areas, wearing a face covering is seen as a political and cultural symbol, and mask requirements have been considered a serious infringement.
In Provo, Utah, dozens of people packed a county commissioners meeting where officials were scheduled to discuss whether students should wear masks when they return to school in the fall. That meeting Wednesday was postponed shortly after it started — many people in the audience had shown up without masks.
Some in the audience booed the commission chairman when he pointed out that the crowd was not following public health guidelines.
“This is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing,” the chairman, Tanner Ainge, a Republican, said, his mask looped around his ears but lowered to his chin. “We are supposed to be physically distancing, wearing masks.”
Clashing views on masks have grown especially pronounced in parts of the Deep South.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statewide mask order, drawing resistance from some in the ranks of the Republican-held Legislature, even as Kemp suspended all local mask mandates, a move that affected at least a dozen cities and drew pledges of defiance from some officials.
“It’s like a rebellion,” said Russell Edwards, a Democrat and the mayor pro tem of Georgia’s Athens-Clarke County, where Kemp is from.
Before Kemp’s suit was filed, Mayor Bottoms, a Democrat who has tested positive for the virus, seemed to anticipate the governor’s challenge of her authority to maintain a mask order. “I am not afraid of the city being sued,” she said, “and I will put our policies up against anyone’s, any day of the week.”
In New York, where the virus hit early and hard, there is fear that opposition to masks in other parts of the country could lead to a resurgence in the state. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, on Thursday unveiled the national ad campaign to promote mask wearing with eight 30-second television spots featuring stars such as Robert De Niro and Jamie Foxx.
The campaign comes as New York, which managed to slow an outbreak that has resulted in more than 30,000 deaths, is trying to prevent the virus from seeping back into the state. Travelers from 22 states where cases are rising are supposed to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival in New York.
“We can only beat this virus if we are united as one, not divided by ideology or politics,” Cuomo said, adding: “I wear a mask to protect you, and you wear a mask to protect me. It is simple as that.”