Why is it Always Masks?

At the risk of becoming a broken record, I am going to post about the doomers again.  Specifically, I would like to address what appear to be their demands.  Or, should I say, their demand.  While there are some semi-reputable groups that have put together reasonable good sets of resources, the typical refrain online is far more single-minded.  To observe this, you only need to scan essentially any doomer's timeline.  Because I don't want you to have to do this, here is a sampling:

The chorus is overwhelming: Permanently wearing a mask is the primary thing you should do to combat COVID, and you're a "bad leftist" if you don't.  This refrain is so consistent and has been weaponized to such extreme ends that none other than ACT UP was pilloried just for making the obvious comparison to the rhetoric that stigmatized AIDS patients decades ago.  To be fair, I have seen people in the doomer-sphere who are more reasonable and measured in their demands.  Here is one such example:

Why do I find this to be far superior than what the mask brigade has to offer?  There are several reasons, some related directly to masking itself, and others that are more about persuasion and solidarity in general.  Let's touch on each of these briefly.

Public Health Shortcomings are Systemic in Nature

As always, yelling at people with the goal of persuading them is almost never effective to that specific end.  This feels obvious to me, but if you disagree I can come to your house and hector you about your shortcomings as something of an in-person demonstration.  The less obvious, related point is that the root cause of essentially any public health shortcoming is not individual behavior but systemic neglect.  And ironically, if you believe that mask-wearing is still a useful action in 2024 (more on this in a minute), then the decline in mask-wearing seems like an almost perfect example of this thesis!  When there were broad mask mandates, people complied at a very high level to great effect.  And when these mandates were rolled back, people changed their behavior accordingly.  We can certainly argue that some of this was a response to the general perception that acquired immunity from vaccines/infections rendered the virus less harmful at that point (sort of the converse of how nations with fewer explicit restrictions still saw dramatically different behavior in 2020).   But more generally, when public health institutions provide reasonable and appropriate guidelines on how to navigate something like the COVID pandemic, people will generally listen and comply.  When they fail to do this, individual people cannot possibly have the wherewithal to make up the difference.  This means that using your advocacy primarily to place that onus on them is inherently self-defeating, even if done in the nicest tone possible.

The Point of Masking

Of course, none of this is to say that public health authorities are wrong to no longer mandate and/or recommend masking.  To understand why this might be the case, it's best to think about why we started masking in the first place.  First and most obviously, in early 2020 we knew next to nothing about how this virus was spread, meaning that the precautionary principle should have (and largely did) rule the day.  Since we knew masks were critical in protecting healthcare workers and mitigating other outbreaks, we hypothesized that they might help limit the spread of COVID and thus adopted them as quickly as our supply chains would allow.  Additionally, the novelty of the virus meant that there was virtually no population immunity from disease, which required us to take all possible measures to prevent overflowing hospitals and mass death.  And that lack of immune memory had a specifically annoying side effect of often rendering individuals contagious before their symptoms kicked in (luckily, this is much less common now), which made more targeted masking guidelines (ie. masking only when symptomatic) insufficient.  All of this and more helped make universal masking a strong option to combat the spread of COVID at the start of the pandemic.  

The Emphasis on Masking

But now, with most of these conditions past us and/or greatly reduced in severity, it is less clear that the benefits of universal masking are worth the cost.  While I advocate for (and practice) masking when symptomatic, when asked, and when in a particularly vulnerable location (think hospitals), I do not think permanent, universal masking is worthwhile nor desirable.  However, this does not mean we should throw our hands up and simply accept relatively routine waves of COVID with little to no mitigation.  Rather, we should pursue the options available to us that specifically address where we are at this stage of the pandemic.  This means demanding better ventilation and filtration in public spaces, significantly improving upon our pathetic ~25% coverage rate in yearly booster campaigns, and pushing for universal sick leave that would allow people to properly isolate while sick and/or infectious.  Not only are these options more meaningful than masking at this point, they're also more conducive to building a greater sense of responsibility and solidarity around how we manage illness and disease in a post-2020 world.