COVID-19, mask rage surging
Americans pay price for rejecting expert advice
After waiting hours for his turn to speak to the Montgomery City Council on June16, pulmonologist Dr. William Saliski spoke slowly and in basic terms about what he had seen on the novel coronavirus front lines in his hospital in an area hit harder than any other in Alabama.
He described emergency units overrun with COVID-19 patients, roughly 90% Black, and warned that if the spread continued, “we will be overrun.”
He offered a simple partial solution: the council should pass the ordinance it was considering to require people to wear masks in public.
“This mask slows that down,” Saliski said while waving a piece of fabric. “Ninety-five percent protection. Something as easy as this cloth.”
But the doctor was met with skepticism. A councilman suggested that to order Montgomery residents to wear masks would be to “throw our constitutional rights out the window.”
Saliski and other doctors stormed out of the meeting in disgust after the council members voted mostly along racial lines – Black members for the mandate and white members against it – and the ordinance failed.
Such combative scenes are increasingly, especially as the virus has taken hold in more conservative regions in the South and West. Face masks or coverings of the sort recommended by health officials to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus have become an unlikely focus of partisanship and racial division, leading to mass refusals to wear them or mandate their use even as government leaders have pushed to reopen the economy.
Local officials voting to require face masks in public have faced lawsuits and have been shouted down by their constituents. Law enforcement leaders have refused to enforce face mask mandates. There have been mask burnings and protests, including one demonstration in which an Arizona council member mimicked victims of police abuse by declaring: “I can’t breathe.”
And as some right-leaning Americans have called masks a tool of oppression, Democratic conspiracy, and even sacrilege, a new genre of viral cellphone video has arrived, featuring verbal or physical scuffles centering on people refusing to cover their faces in Costco, Trader Joe’s, or other public places. Shoppers irate about masks have vandalized a store display and spat on a 7Eleven counter upon being asked to put on one, and one man pulled a gun because a fellow shopper refused to wear one.
For public health experts, the fissure over masks is yet another unwelcome headache in a battle against the novel coronavirus. With more than 3.2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and upward of 134,000 deaths, the United States has been by far the world’s hardest-hit nation.
“If we’re going to move on we’ve got to get everybody on the same page,” said Dr. Glen Nowak, a University of Georgia professor who previously ran media relations and communications at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Because if we don’t, we’re going to be dealing with this divisiveness for a long time.”
Dr. Michael Baker, a professor ofpublic health at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said no other country’s citizens have taken such a willful stance against masks, and that international health officials have been particularly stunned that American leaders at the highest levels have done relatively little to urge mask-wearing, and at times have even seemed to belittle it.
“This idea that you’re going to make a political statement by infecting people around you just seems absolutely outrageous to me and I think to most people who think about it,” Baker said. “Why would you do that? Why would you encourage that behavior?”
Baker said the dissent against masks has coupled dangerously with the American rush to reopen businesses even with infection cases at record levels.
“Not endorsing mask use and also encouraging the country to get back to work just seems like a terrible contradiction because, actually, mass masking would be one of the best tools for helping a country get back to work and it’s cheap and effective,” Baker said. “You’re just creating this perfect storm for yourselves in the U.S. by doing that.”
The experts interviewed by USA TODAY said that despite early misgivings by the CDC and the World Health Organization about the protection offered by wearing masks, there is now significant evidence that the practice slows the spread of the virus.
Though there has been speculation that mask-wearing during widespread police brutality protests prevented novel coronavirus numbers from spiking in those cities, Nowak cautioned that it’s “probably impossible to take public events and draw inferences in terms of masks” and the resulting infection numbers.
President Donald Trump has been the country’s most visible waffler on the societal value of wearing a mask. Trump has said “I’m all for masks,” but at other times has mocked rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for wearing one. Trump had said he declined to wear one because he didn’t want to give members of the media “the pleasure” of seeing it on him, but wore one in public for the first time on Saturday in a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Few supporters wore masks while packed closely together at Trump’s recent large gatherings in Tulsa, Oklahoma – which was followed by a rise in COVID-19 cases there that the city’s health director said were “more than likely” a result of the rally – and in front of Mount Rushmore.