Wearing mask with pride
OK everyone, you’re looking good with those face masks. Now, was that so hard?
Sheesh, there you are walking by each other in the supermarket, exhaling and inhaling all over the place. Imagine all the little invisible nasties floating so gently on the air, looking for those mucous membranes of yours.
Hey you there, stacking the shelves! Thanks for helping us out, but you have to cover your nose, as well as your mouth and chin. And tightly. Don’t worry, you can still breathe.
And don’t give me that crap about it being too restrictive, or that you don’t need a mask because you feel fine.
Wearing a mask isn’t about you.
It’s about everyone else. The best thing to do is figure that you are already carrying the infection and can pass it on to others within that 6-foot death zone. Even if you don’t slide into the full-blown fever, headache, dry cough, weakness, soreness, difficulty breathing, hospitalization, you can still spread the infection, which makes the whole public health crisis scary and insidious.
While the Shelton supermarket employees are doing the front-line service of keeping us supplied, within a mile of the parking lot, three different nursing homes experienced at least 40 deaths by Friday morning.
Those are 40 deaths that rocked their nursing home communities, where families have been prohibited from visiting in what is becoming a failed attempt to protect the fragile elderly from infection, and where overwhelmed staff are watching the virus cut a swath through their residents.
That’s 40 families who were unable to join their grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers as COVID-19 was literally taking away their breath. Put it in the context of 40 percent of the overall 1,036 fatalities as of Friday were in nursing homes.
Remember when Gov. Lamont banned visitations in nursing homes on March 9? Remember the criticism he got? Turns out he may have waited too long.
For the last 25 months, I’ve known it was a gift that I was able to be bedside with my 92-year-old father as his life ebbed away in Stamford Hospital a week after a fall in the house in which I grew up.
I stood there with him, brushing his hair back with one hand, holding his hand with the other, talking quietly, telling him how much my sister and I loved him and our late mother, as he drifted into death.
It’s a family responsibility and now, in the COVID Age, it turns out to have been a lucky privilege.
In my mind, anyone not
In my mind, anyone not properly wearing a face mask in public, is trying to kill more people, as if 1,036 between March 18 and April 17 isn’t enough.
properly wearing a face mask in public, is trying to kill more people, as if 1,036 between March 18 and April 17 isn’t enough.
That’s 1,036 people whose best hope in bidding farewell to their families was over a touchscreen device, since they had to die alone, in this historic cascade of suffering and sorrow.
So yeah, I’ll proudly wear a face mask in public.
On Friday, I asked Lamont if he maybe regretted waiting until just a few days ago to order people to wear something, practically anything to cover their noses and mouths.
“We certainly urged everybody in a public situation a long time ago, and I think many people were doing that,” Lamont said. “We obviously had a supply issue. I mean even Electric Boat couldn’t provide masks for their folks going to the factory floor until very recently. But you’re right, I could have told everybody to wear a scarf starting right now. I think we did it pretty much as everybody else. In hindsight if we had done it three weeks earlier it probably would have been helpful, and whether everybody would have followed that order is another question.”
Let’s face it, a scarf or bandanna doesn’t have the efficacy of an N95.
“It’s maybe not even as good as a cloth mask,” Lamont said. “Maybe it doesn’t protect you as much, but it surely protects everybody you’re around. So until we get our supply of masks that are coming in dribs and drabs ... We’ve got them for our first-responders, we got them for our nurses, but we really only have them for our hospitals. At some time we’re going to be able to provide better masks for everybody, but in the meantime, wear your scarf.”
The governor occasionally prefaces his public remarks as pointing out that he was a sociology major. When this is over, his alma mater — that place in downtown New Haven — should consider awarding him a master’s degree in public health.