Discards: A Meditation on Masks
We’ve Slid into Post-Pandemic Thinking Without Discussing Whether the Pandemic is Actually Over
A black mask
dropped to macadam
— easy to step over, ignore,
so I snap a photo
to remember what we used to do
Rutgers is discarding its mask requirement. The announcement went out today, explaining that “face coverings will no longer be required in indoor teaching spaces and libraries,” and that the wearing of masks will be a personal choice. The reason, university officials said in an email, is that the “COVID-19 virus continues to move from pandemic toward endemic,” and that officials are “eager to return the university to normal operations as much as responsibly possible.”
I’m not sure how to feel about this decision. I’ve mostly stopped wearing masks in public spaces, aside from healthcare facilities, airports, and at Rutgers. The other schools at which I teach ended their requirements during the spring semester, and it is rare to find anywhere else that is requiring their use.
Still, 1.1 million have died of the virus in he United States (6.5 million worked wide) since it appeared in January 2000, and death totals continue to rise, though more slowly.
What troubles me is not that we are moving away from mask wearing, but that we seem to be doing it without thought or discussion, that instead of coming together as a society and calculating the risks and debating whether these risks are acceptable, we are allowing ourselves to be dragged out by the current.
Ellie Murray, an epidemiology assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told Chris Hayes on his Why Is This Happening podcast that is is of utmost importance that have this debate.
I always say like as a scientist, as an epidemiologist, I can tell you how to go about figuring out how to control an infectious disease. I can go about telling you how to figure out whether an infectious disease is controlled, but I can't tell you what the level it should be controlled at. That's a political decision.
And so, one of the things there is, that I have been really saying over and over again, and pushing for is more of a public conversation about what is our target, right?
That means asking, she says, “how many deaths a day from COVID are we happy with? Are we happy if we can keep it out of the top 5 deaths and it's just somewhere below five on the list of things that kill Americans? Do we want to keep it out of the top 10 deaths? Do we want to do better than that?”
Early on, we had some of these discussions, though they ended up breaking down as a devoted cohort on the right sought to recast public health protections as assaults on freedoms. This ended any discussion and, as the virus has shifted and eased, as more of us — but not enough of us — have become vaccinated with great success, we have been unwilling to ask what the end of this pandemic will look like and instead have retreated to bunkered positions.
Sliding into a new reality, which is what we are doing, may feel like getting back to normal, but the threat remains extant. Not talking about it does not mean it has disappeared.
***
Early in the pandemic, I wrote a short post to Instagram
as part of a project I was calling Front Lines, but that eventually came to be called Book of Plagues. The post focused on a discarded face mask, like the one that triggered this meditation.