COMMENTARY: Staying healthy amid the ongoing chaos
Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams wants you to meet Mr. Melvin.
"He was my Uber driver today," Adams tweeted. "He also has had a double lung transplant and is waiting on a kidney transplant. I wanted you to meet him because he is impacted by the recent mask ruling. …" Mr. Melvin, Adams said, is the sort of person you're talking about when you say people are on their own in protecting themselves against COVID-19.
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, is no fan of the ruling that struck down the mask mandate for people using various forms of public transportation. He called it "a bad decision, sloppily done."
"It's creating chaos," Benjamin told the website Medpage Today. "We all knew we were going to have to do a transition, but I hoped the transition would be more orderly - sitting down and saying, 'OK, we're going to stop the masks; here's what it means.'" A lot of folks have decided it doesn't mean much. For them, the pandemic is over.
A recent survey by the polling firm Ipsos found two-thirds of respondents saying they had gone out to eat or visited friends in the past week. Just 9% described the state of the coronavirus in the United States as "a serious crisis," and almost twice that many said it was not a problem at all.
A third of respondents said they had already returned to their PRE-COVID routines, and another 23% said they expected to do so within the next six months.
Only about a quarter of respondents said they were still wearing masks when they left home. That was down from 43% in early February. The number of Americans who said they were still practicing social distancing stood at 36% in the latest survey, the lowest level since last summer.
Still, public health experts recommend wearing a mask around people you don't know, even if you're fully vaccinated and boosted.
"You should probably still wear your mask in transpiration areas - on a bus and at least when loading and unloading on a plane," Benjamin said.
All of that brings us back to Mr. Melvin, a man whose health conditions leave him particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Mr. Melvin might be able to stay home if he qualified for disability, Adams said, but he feels healthy enough to work and thus doesn't want to take money from the government.
"So he drives," Adams tweeted. "And last week, a judge ruled his workplace mask free."
Adams, a former Indiana state health commissioner, is now executive director of health equity initiatives at Purdue University.
As he rode toward his destination, Adams noticed his driver was wearing an older surgical mask, one that had seen a fair amount of use. So Adams gave his new acquaintance the five pack of KN95S he carried in his suitcase.
Will donning one of those masks actually help? Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, says the answer just might be yes.
"One-way masking works, if you wear the right mask," he tweeted. "KN95, KF94 or better. For those at risk from COVID, or who want added safety even as those around them unmask, a high quality mask worn properly can afford a measurable degree of added protection."
We'd all be safer, of course, if everyone at a large gathering were wearing a mask, but the experts say one well-fitted N95-style respirator can filter out 95% of airborne particles all by itself, no matter what anyone else in the room might be wearing.
As for those poking fun at the holdouts, Adams offers a reminder.
"When you shame people like me for wearing a mask," he tweeted, "you shame us for thinking about people like Mr. Melvin."
Worse yet, he said, you might be shaming the people folks like Adams are trying to protect.