Despite delayed and muddled messaging, wear a mask
Top health authorities erred earlier this year when they told the public that wearing masks or other face coverings was not the right move, even as the COVID-19 pandemic started to hit the U.S. hard.
In the midst of a shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment for frontline health care workers, their message to citizens was that masks wouldn’t help prevent spread of the virus generally.
Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has recently acknowledged that officials were worried about exacerbating the problem of finding PPE for doctors, nurses, EMTs and others putting their lives on the line.
But even as we saw people on the streets of large Asian cities masking up, there were expert talking heads on TV telling us the face coverings were ineffective. In February, the surgeon general tweeted that people should stop buying masks and that they don’t help members of the public from becoming infected. A prominent medical journal published a study saying masks were of little use; it was later withdrawn.
Eventually, of course, a solid medical consensus emerged that masks are key to preventing spread of COVID-19 through droplets in the air. A Chinese scientist’s assertion that the U.S. and Europe should have been on board with masks all along helped push the idea forward.
We were soon learning how to turn folded bandanas and rubber bands into serviceable masks, and amateurs with sewing machines — and then companies — started cranking out cloth masks for us to wear, some of them with highfashion touches.
At this point, it’s unclear how much the initial anti-mask advice was due to how hard it’s been for the scientific community to get a handle on this new virus versus concern over a lack of PPE for medical workers.
It always seemed counterintuitive that face masks wouldn’t help stop the spread of an infectious disease.
Should we have been told from the start to leave manufactured masks to the hospitals, emergency rooms and ambulances, but urged to pull out the bandanas or find those hardware store masks left over from a home improvement project and put them to use?
Or would that, while more honest and could have reduced virus infections, have created hysteria that would have gobbled up available PPE needed for frontline medical staffers and first responders?
In any case, the confusion helped bolster the anti-science bias of many people in these strange times. With the current occupant of the Oval Office regularly downplaying the virus, recently to the point of holding a rally in a city where infections were on the rise, it was certain that the epidemic would be politicized. And now masks are a hot-button issue.
President Trump is among those who won’t be seen in public wearing one. Some people apparently see masks as antiTrump or just unmanly, and there’s a vocal constituency that believes a mask requirement is government overreach that violates personal freedom.
There is absolutely no basis for this last assertion. You’re not free to legally drive 90 mph down a small residential street because that endangers others. Manufacturers aren’t free to dump hazardous materials into rivers used as water supplies because that endangers others. Likewise, in a medical emergency caused by droplets that travel in the air between humans, you shouldn’t be free to be out in public without a mask. It’s not “my body, my choice”; eschewing a mask endangers the bodies of others.
The COVID pandemic raises difficult issues of how to balance public health against the damage to the economy, and even education, caused by closures. But wearing masks is easy (and, now, under state and city edicts, you can be fined if you don’t).
Cases of infection and deaths from the virus continue to mount. The country is coming up on what someone familiar with New Mexico’s role in World War II might describe as two atomic bombs worth of COVID-19 fatalities.
So just wear the darned masks.