As holidays approach, face masks are a rare sight
Use of protection more situational than universal
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.
There’s the odd one here and there, but nothing like it was three years ago at the dawn of the COVID pandemic’s first winter holidays — an American moment of contentiousness, accusation, and scorn on both sides of the mask debate.
As 2023 draws to an end, with promises of holiday parties and crowds and lots of inadvertent exchanges of shared air, mask-wearing is much more off than on around the country even as COVID's long tail lingers. The days of anything approaching a widespread mask mandate would be like the Ghost of Christmas Past, a glimpse into what was.
These days, mask-wearing has become just another thing that simply happens in America. In a country where the mention of a mask before the pandemic usually meant Halloween or a costume party, it’s a new way of being that has not gone away even if most people aren’t doing it regularly.
“That’s an interesting part of the pandemic,” says 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 says. “But something like mask-wearing in the US 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 Dec. 20 because it’s seeing an increase in respiratory viruses.
It wasn’t that long ago that fear of catching COVID-19 sent demand for masks into overdrive, with terms like “N95” coming into our vocabularies alongside concepts of 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 that it would stop sales Monday because there wasn’t enough interest.
Anne Miller, the organization’s executive director, acknowledged 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 says.
But that’s not how norms work, public safety or otherwise, said Markus Kemmelmeier, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Reno.
In 2020, Kemmelmeier oversaw a study about mask-wearing around the country that showed usage and mandate resistance varied by region based on conditions, including pre-existing cultural divisions and political orientation.
He points to the outcry after the introduction of seatbelts and seatbelt laws more than four decades ago as an example of how practices, particularly those required in certain parts of society, do or don't take hold.
“When they first were instituted with all the sense that they make and all the effectiveness, there was a lot of resistance,” Kemmelmeier said. “The argument was basically lots of complaints about individual freedoms being curtailed and so forth, and you can’t tell me what to do and so forth.”