The Most Honest Pro-Mask Mandate Article Ever

theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-mask-mandate-washington-dc/622860/

Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?

When the mayor of Washington, D.C., announced changes to the city’s mask mandate last week, spit hit the fan. As of March 1, District residents will need to cover up in order to attend school, go to a library, or ride in a taxi. But gyms, sports arenas, concert venues, and houses of worship—you know, all the places where people like to breathe hard or sing and shout in close proximity—will be facial free-for-alls.

If the goal of mask policies is to reduce transmission of the coronavirus as much as possible, then D.C.’s new rules are difficult to reason out. Why should children, who are generally at low risk of severe disease, have to mask while sitting quietly in class when their more vulnerable elders can sing, unmasked, in church? It seems arbitrary, inconsistent, absurd.

Then again, so does just about every community mask mandate. If the rules don’t apply equally in different settings, they’re unfair. If they do, they’re ridiculous: Good luck complying in a restaurant, bar, or airport food court. Pointing out the logical flaws in mask mandates is easy. Fixing them is hard—and important. Cases may be trending down in nearly every part of the United States, but this surge will almost certainly not be our last, just as Omicron will almost certainly not be the last variant to infect the world. When infection rates begin to rise again, local and state governments can try to implement mask policies that actually make sense to the people being ordered around.

Take my city, Baltimore, as an example. Everyone older than 2 must wear a mask “indoors at any location other than a private home,” including at “Foodservice Establishments.” Yet indoor dining, which is associated with increasing COVID-19 transmission rates, has been allowed for more than a year, and diners do not need to be vaccinated. Performers are allowed to sing, speak, and play the oboe sans mask, despite the fact that maskless music has been known to be a potent source of contagion since the early days of the pandemic. I frequently walk past restaurants with mask required for entry signs taped to the front door and their windows fogged up from the breath of maskless patrons. And in spaces where masks are both required and feasible—say, pharmacies and grocery stores—hardly anyone is enforcing their use.

It all feels rather performative and silly. Why have a mandate if it can be so easily ignored? “The public sees right through that, and I think that’s led to a lot of the backlash,” Joseph Allen, the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, told me. To Allen, mask mandates’ contradictions and compliance failures are signs that the U.S. should stop trying so hard to influence human behavior, and start focusing on improving ventilation and filtration in buildings. Masking, because it’s obviously visible and has become unavoidably politicized, is the pandemic-mitigation strategy that’s easiest for most people to notice—which might explain why it’s received so much attention from the public and the media. But structural improvements can operate in the background, protecting people without making them feel inconvenienced.

One common (though not definitively proven) argument against mask mandates is that they don’t actually change people’s behavior: People who would’ve masked anyway cover up, and people who don’t want to mask wear theirs badly or ignore the rules. “Anyone who has been in any sort of public location at any time during the pandemic recognizes that mask mandates are not followed consistently,” says David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. But even disregarded mandates could affect people in other, helpful ways. “From my perspective, the main benefit is not so much the masking itself, but the message to society that this wave is not yet over,” Dowdy told me. A mask mandate may not magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space.

Mask mandates are easier to enforce in highly controlled environments, such as schools. A particular state’s or city’s values and political makeup matter for compliance too. “If it’s a community in which most people are already going to mask and you just need to convince a few more, in that case a mandate actually might be beneficial,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Such communities are widespread: About two-thirds of Americans have consistently supported the idea of a state or local mask mandate since August, when a bimonthly Axios/Ipsos poll first started asking the question.

The other 30-something percent of the American public likely includes people who have lost faith in mask mandates that don’t seem to make sense. The way for decision makers to earn back their trust, Kirk Sell told me, is by listening to each community, taking their needs seriously, and tailoring policies to fit them. A town whose top priorities are keeping schools open and local business afloat could mandate masks and testing in schools, but allow adults to go mask-free in bars, which students can avoid. A town that wants to avoid straining its hospitals might flatten the curve by enforcing mask requirements in high-capacity settings such as concert halls and sports arenas. If rules are going to be applied unevenly—with mask mandates in some locations but not others—the tightest restrictions should apply in buildings such as grocery stores, workplaces, post offices, and schools, says Anne Sosin, a public-health expert at Dartmouth College. These are not necessarily the places where the virus is most likely to spread, but elderly and immunocompromised people may not be able to avoid them as easily as they could a bar or a hockey game.

“I think that people have this expectation that everything has to be perfect, as far as how the logic works together,” Kirk Sell said. But no mandate is ever going to be perfectly consistent, and that’s okay. Mask policies can still make sense, so long as they serve a community’s shared goals.

@sh76 said
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-mask-mandate-washington-dc/622860/

[quote]Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?

When the mayor of Washington, D.C., announced changes to the city’s mask mandate last week, spit hit the fan. As of March 1, District residents will need to cover up in order to attend school, go to a library, or ride in a taxi. But gyms, spor ...[text shortened]... ehow snuck its way into The Atlantic, it's the most scathing indictment of mask mandates imaginable.

@jimm619 said
Of course, the only entity that could
set uniform standards would be The Feds,
and you-know-who would scream, from FOX NEWS
about 'personal freedoms being curtailed.

@sh76 said
The federal government would not be empowered to set or enforce a nation-wide mask mandate except perhaps one that would apply to federal property and national parks.

OSHA could possibly set a mask mandate for employment sites, which seemingly would pass muster under the vaccine case (since it would end when the employee leaves the office).

Both are terrible ideas, IMO, bu ...[text shortened]... pro-mask mandate author, concedes that they do not, except in some convoluted ancillary sort of way.

@jimm619 said
Mask use has been shown to inhibit the spread of COVID.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent

@sh76 said
No doubt, if the mask is a good mask and worn correctly but as far as I know, mask mandates wherein reluctant people wear cloth masks around their chin half the time have not been shown to matter much.

Ever been on a plane since COVID? [Personally, I wear a KN95 on a plane because why not? (if I have to wear one anyway, I might as well wear on that actually does someth ...[text shortened]... tty safe anyway, given that plane air is well filtered, but the mandates don't help much, if at all.

@sh76 said
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-mask-mandate-washington-dc/622860/

[quote]Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?

When the mayor of Washington, D.C., announced changes to the city’s mask mandate last week, spit hit the fan. As of March 1, District residents will need to cover up in order to attend school, go to a library, or ride in a taxi. But gyms, spor ...[text shortened]... ehow snuck its way into The Atlantic, it's the most scathing indictment of mask mandates imaginable.

@wildgrass said
Scathing indictment? Is there any public health policy that isn't applied unevenly? Pretty much all of them seem to be from my perspective. Speed limits and other driving laws are good examples. Something applied unevenly doesn't mean it's pointless.

If anti-maskers want to be consistent, lets do away with all public health measures.

@wildgrass said
Scathing indictment? Is there any public health policy that isn't applied unevenly? Pretty much all of them seem to be from my perspective. Speed limits and other driving laws are good examples. Something applied unevenly doesn't mean it's pointless.

If anti-maskers want to be consistent, lets do away with all public health measures.

@sh76 said
If you wanted to compare mask mandates to speed limits, the limit would always be 30, but if you're eating you can go as fast as you'd like.

@sh76 said
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-mask-mandate-washington-dc/622860/

[quote]Mask Mandates Are Illogical. So What?

When the mayor of Washington, D.C., announced changes to the city’s mask mandate last week, spit hit the fan. As of March 1, District residents will need to cover up in order to attend school, go to a library, or ride in a taxi. But gyms, spor ...[text shortened]... ehow snuck its way into The Atlantic, it's the most scathing indictment of mask mandates imaginable.

Why children should wear masks in schools is not about protecting the children. The best available evidence indicates that children are much less at risk of serious illness than adults or immunocompromised persons. Moreover, schools don't have to close if 1/3 of students contract the disease. The masks are for the protection of the teaching staff of the schools, for if 1/3 of school staff contracts the disease, then schools really do have to close.

Same applies to hospitals and medical facilities. If 1/3 of the hospital staff are out sick for ten days, guess who doesn't get medical treatment, not only for COVID but for all the ordinary stuff like heart attacks, strokes, car crash traumas, etc etc. Hmmm? All those people who refused to get vaxxed or to wear masks everywhere else don't get treatment, that's who. So it makes sense that wearing masks should be mandatory in hospitals and medical facilities, but not necessarily everywhere else (such as concerts, theatres, etc.).

The wearing of masks in certain professions helps to ensure that the infrastructure does not collapse. If 1/3 of bus and train drivers don't show up because they've contracted COVID, public transport collapses. If 1/3 of pilots and maintenance crews don't show up, plane flights get cancelled. Hence, it makes sense that people working in certain critical positions be protected, so, the wearing of masks is mandatory when riding public transport or on planes (in Switzerland, where I live) but no longer in restaurants (the infrastructure does not collapse if people can't get their Big Macs and fries).

@mchill said
Unless this is written by an anti-mask double agent or was a Babylon Bee article that somehow snuck its way into The Atlantic, it's the most scathing indictment of mask mandates imaginable.

I share your frustration. This patchwork of mask policies targeting specific groups is just plain silly, in the macro view however, few health professionals would argue that over the last 2+ years masks have saved many thousands of lives in this country.

@moonbus said
Why children should wear masks in schools is not about protecting the children. The best available evidence indicates that children are much less at risk of serious illness than adults or immunocompromised persons. Moreover, schools don't have to close if 1/3 of students contract the disease. The masks are for the protection of the teaching staff of the schools, for if 1/3 of ...[text shortened]... in restaurants (the infrastructure does not collapse if people can't get their Big Macs and fries).

@moonbus said
Masks alone are not very effective in controlling a pandemic. They have to be part of a coordinated system of measures, which includes disinfecting, testing, demographically tracking outbreaks, quarantines, vaccination, and so on. This was made clear from the very beginning. But masks have become the bugbear of the anti-government fringe.