Masks decorate landscape as occasionally needed feature
NEW YORK — The scene: A crowded shopping center in the weeks before Christmas. Or a warehouse store. Or maybe a packed airport terminal or a commuter train station or another place where large groups gather.
There are people — lots of people. But look around, and it’s clear one thing is largely absent these days: face masks.
Yes, there’s the odd one here and there, but nothing like it was three years ago at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic’s first winter holidays — an American moment of contentiousness, accusation and scorn on both sides of the mask debate.
The days of anything approaching a widespread mask mandate would be like the Ghost of Christmas Past, a glimpse into what was.
Look at it a different way, though: These days, maskwearing has become another thing that occasionally happens in America.
“That’s an interesting part of the pandemic,” said Brooke Tully, a strategist who works on how to change people’s behaviors.
“Home delivery of food and all of those kind of services, they existed before COVID and actually were gaining some momentum,” she said. “But something like mask-wearing in the U.S. didn’t really have an existing baseline. It was something entirely new in COVID. So it’s one of those new introductions of behaviors and norms.”
It tends to be situational, like the recent decision from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital system to reinstate a mask mandate at its facilities starting Wednesday because it’s seeing an increase in respiratory viruses. And for people like Sally Kiser, 60, of Mooresville, North Carolina, who manages a home health care agency.
“I always carry one with me,” she said, “’cause I never know.”
She doesn’t always wear it, depending on the environment she’s in, but she will if she thinks it’s prudent. “It’s kind of like a new paradigm for the world we live in,” she said.
It wasn’t that long ago that fear over catching COVID-19 sent demand for masks into overdrive, with terms like “N95” coming into our vocabularies alongside concepts like mask mandates — and the subsequent, and vehement, backlash from those who felt it was government overreach.
Once the mandates started dropping, the masks started coming off and the demand fell. It fell so much so that Project N95, a nonprofit launched during the pandemic to help people find quality masks, announced earlier this month it would stop sales Monday because there wasn’t enough interest.
Anne Miller, the organization’s executive director, acknowledges she thought widespread mask usage would become the rule, not the exception.
“I thought the new normal would be like we see in other cultures and other parts of the world — where people just wear a mask out of an abundance of caution for other people,” she said.
In New York City, members of the Park Slope Co-op recently decided there was a need at the longstanding, membership-required grocery. Last month, the co-op instituted mask-required Wednesdays and Thursdays; the other five days continue to have no requirement.
The people who proposed it weren’t focused on COVID-19 rates. They were thinking about immunecompromised people, a population that has always existed but came to mainstream awareness during the pandemic, said co-op general manager Joe Holtz.
Proponents of the mask push at the co-op emphasized immunecompromised people are more at risk from other people’s respiratory ailments like colds and flu. Implementing a window of required mask usage allows them to be more protected, Holtz said.
It was up to the store’s administrators to pick the days, and they went with two of the slowest instead of the busy weekend days on purpose, Holtz said, a nod to the reality that mask requirements get different responses from people.