Masking the truth

Ignoring all the evidence that face coverings stop coronavirus, forgetting that his own COVID-stricken buddy Chris Christie, thankfully out of the ICU, had just hours earlier admitted he was wrong not to shield his nose and mouth at the White House super-spreader event, President Trump used Thursday’s TV town hall to keep up his insane, deadly dangerous war on masks.

Immediately after proclaiming, “I’m good with masks,” he added: “They came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it,” implying that face coverings themselves offer little benefit and maybe even pose a risk. When NBC’s Savannah Guthrie countered with facts, Trump mumbled about Dr. Tony Fauci’s early March uncertainty on masks, then repeated the lie: “You have a report coming out two days ago that 85% of the people wearing masks catch it.”

It’s really a lie about a lie, one that may well have started with a crackpot Monday blog post by a former Breitbart staffer, the essence of which was repeated on Tucker Carlson’s TV show the next day, claiming that masks are useless since 85% of COVID patients wore them. Trump took that false claim and mangled it further, asserting that 85% of mask wearers get infected.

The actual study, from the CDC’s Sept. 11 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, compared 154 symptomatic COVID-infected patients with 160 symptomatic patients who tested negative. The groups were similar in almost all respects, including mask-wearing habits, 85% for the infected people and 88.7% for the non-infected.

The one statistically significant difference: The COVID-positive “were approximately twice as likely to have reported dining at a restaurant.” Of course, masks come off to eat — proving, drum roll, that masks work.

People will get sick and some will die because of idiots who distort the truth. What a perfectly terrible, terribly perfect vignette of America in the age of Trump.