I don't wear a mask for me or ‘self-righteous'

For now, I’m wearing a face covering every time I go to a public place.

I’m not doing it for me – I’m fully vaccinated, like 55% of Ohioans, according to the Mayo Clinic. I’m doing it for the unvaccinated, which accounts for about 30% of all Americans.

Why, might you ask, would I do something for a group of self-righteous people who put themselves first without regard to the health of others?

First, that’s a little harsh.

There are people that have legitimate medical reasons for not getting the shot. But there aren’t that many.

Instead, the anti-vaxxers won’t budge to the point half of them won’t even take the new Pfizer pill.

I don’t care about that. I care about wearing a mask so other people trying to do the right thing don’t die. I wear a mask so children don’t suffer.

We all know the numbers – more than 800,000 dead – so there’s no need to go over them in detail. Infections continue to climb and will likely do so over the next few months. In Ohio, pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations have tripled in a week. The state keeps breaking records for hospitalized COVID patients, the overwhelming majority of whom have not been vaccinated.

I worry about people like Dale Weeks. Weeks got sick in his small town and needed to be transferred to a larger hospital for treatment.

But all the beds in the facilities were full with COVID patients and Weeks could not get the care he needed. After waiting 15 days, he died.

His daughter, Jennifer Owenson, told the Washington Post: “The thing that bothers me the most is people’s selfish decision not to get vaccinated and the failure to see how this affects a greater group of people. That’s the part that’s really difficult to swallow.”

I worry about people like Robert Van Pelt, who was just 44 years old when he died following a routine medical procedure. His family said he waited three days for an ICU bed and by the time he got one, he died.

I worry about all these children, some so small they’re not eligible to get a vaccine yet, sitting terrified in a hospital, calling for their parents, feeling miserable. It is true they could have picked up COVID anywhere these days. But I hope mommy and daddy have a good explanation if they made their babies sick because they wouldn’t get a shot.

So that’s why I wear a mask. If I can help keep one unvaccinated person out of the hospital, that means a bed opens up for someone who had a heart attack, or stroke or needs other emergency care. It could mean the difference between life and death.

I’ve thought about solutions to ensure hospital beds remain available. Maybe we change HIPPA laws and deny hospital care to the unvaccinated with COVID if beds reach a certain threshold, or maybe insurance companies could make them pay the full bill.

I don’t think, as a society, we need to treat people – even those who disregard others – as callously as they treat us. We are supposed to be a society built on compassion and understanding, so I try to understand why people remain unvaccinated.

But there are some things that never make any sense.

So instead of dwelling on that, I’m wearing a mask in public. I do it not for me, but for the unvaccinated who impact people like Dale Weeks and Robert Van Pelt, two men who did not deserve to die this way.

Ray Marcano, a long-time journalist, is the former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, a two-time Pulitzer juror, and a Fulbright fellow. He is a frequent Dispatch contributor.