Mask mandates: Is it time to show our faces again?
Sunday’s Super Bowl marked “our unofficial return to normality,” said Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review. After two years of pandemic restrictions, the nationally televised sight of a stadium packed with 70,000 “almost entirely maskless” fans—in the liberal stronghold of Los Angeles, no less—sent a strong signal that, “as a culture, we are ready for the end.” Days earlier, the Democratic governors of 11 blue states reacted to the plunge in Omicron cases by announcing the imminent lifting of indoor mask mandates—an action most Republican governors took last summer. It’s about time, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, but let’s be clear: Democrats’ “sudden shift” on masking policy isn’t “based on any change in the science.” They’re simply scared that exhausted Americans are “far more annoyed by the restrictions than they are scared by the virus,” and are ready to wreak vengeance in the November midterm elections on the party of endless safetyism.
Oh, those wily Democrats, said Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. When they supported masks, distancing, and other precautions to curb the pandemic, it was a “secret plot”—first to cost Donald Trump the 2020 election, then to impose “totalitarian social control.” Now that many Democratic governors want to lift restrictions, as they previously did before the Delta wave last summer, it’s a scheme “to win the 2022 elections.” The less convoluted explanation is that Democrats are, in fact, following the science, and that mandates are being lifted because the Omicron wave is subsiding, and new “Covid cases are plummeting”—down two-thirds in only three weeks. Nor has there been any sea change in public opinion, said Anthony Salvanto in CBSNews.com. A new CBS poll finds that 56 percent of Americans still support mask mandates for indoor public places. Among Democrats, 85 percent want mask mandates to continue for now.
For schools in particular, lifting mandates is “premature and irresponsible,” said Natalia Linos in The Boston Globe. Covid may be relatively mild for most kids, but it has killed nearly 1,000 children in the U.S.—far more than the flu’s usual death toll. Schools, with their crowded classrooms and cafeterias, easily spread the virus throughout a community. As a parent, I’m as keen as anyone to see my kids enjoy a “normal” childhood, but that includes keeping schools open. The data is clear that mask mandates reduce outbreaks. That’s why the CDC still recommends masking in schools and other crowded indoor places.
The CDC also recommends avoiding “medium-rare hamburgers,” said David Leonhardt in The New York Times. Scientists naturally err on the side of caution. But it’s the job of elected officials to make “hard choices” about trade-offs, balancing the benefits of mask mandates and other restrictions with their costs, including isolation, frustration, and depression. Children in particular desperately need relief from masks, fear, and distancing. With so many Americans either vaccinated against Covid or carrying antibodies from a natural infection, it’s time to take “steps toward normalcy.” Covid is still killing more than 2,000 Americans a day, said Katherine Wu in The Atlantic, and no one should go diving “into a maskless mosh pit.” But it’s now clear that Covid may always be with us, and “delayed gratification doesn’t work so well when the delay has no clear end in sight.” For vaccinated and boosted people, this phase of the pandemic can be “defined less by what we can’t do, and more by what we safely, carefully, finally can.”