Please Wear a Mask
Nearly four years into the pandemic, many seem to have forgotten the precautions that kept us safe in the first place.
These days, I rarely go out in public besides going to the gym or buying groceries, but when I do venture out into these spaces, I am almost always the only person I see wearing a face mask. I wear a surgical mask every time I leave the house (and the mask is always black, because it goes with all my outfits). Even when I went to my nearest Kaiser Permanente facility to pick up my medications, the majority of patients around me were barefaced, and in some harrowing instances, the medical professionals were too. This trend has instilled a bit of agoraphobia in me. I’ve had COVID two times since January 2022, and while each infection was difficult to overcome, the greater challenge has been managing the mild illnesses that spring up in my body every few months since then. Before the pandemic, I used to get sick maybe twice a year, usually around the holidays, and get over it pretty quickly. But those COVID infections wrecked my immune system, leaving me easily stricken by colds that take over a week to shake off each time. As such, I get really afraid of being around strangers who don’t wear masks. Additionally, some people in my life have treated my COVID precautions as if they were unreasonable, which I’ve found to be quite aggravating. In some ways I felt gaslit, as almost everyone I know has gotten COVID at one point or another. Most of my friends work in-person jobs or live with people who do. A lot of us have gone back to “normal” life, some getting COVID in the process, and others somehow making it through unscathed. I’m privileged to not personally know anyone who has died of COVID. But every time I go out in public, I wonder how many thousands of lives could have been saved if COVID precautions had been implemented immediately, and if people had actually adhered to them the whole time.
With the beginning of the pandemic occurring at the tail end of the Trump presidency, I feel as though it was inevitable that the rhetoric around coronavirus filtered into the egotism that divided the American political consciousness. Tensions between the left and right were already elevated before life as we knew it came to a complete halt, causing many Americans to aim their very justified anger at one another as thousands lost their jobs, homes, and loved ones. I’ll never forget opening Twitter one day in June of 2020 to see the Huntington Beach Pier in Huntington Beach, California, a largely Republican city that I’ve been forced to visit many times, filled with boomers and their young children conducting a so-called freedom march protesting the recent mask mandate and proclaiming that the pandemic was a fabrication of “communist elites.” Curiously, some of the photos of the event depict attendees themselves wearing face masks, and a few are even wearing surgical ones properly over their noes. Of the cities in the surrounding Orange County, Huntington Beach faced 2,581 reported COVID cases and 86 COVID deaths in the months following the “freedom march,” making it the third most affected city in the region as of October 2020.
From seeing images of the Huntington Beach anti-mask protests, I learned about the variety of “plandemic” conspiracy theories that would later gain traction as 2020 progressed and COVID took millions of lives worldwide. A lot, and I do mean a LOT, of members of the American public were fed lies on social media about the inefficacy and even the inherent danger of face masks. One particularly mind-boggling myth claimed that face masks made you re-inhale the carbon dioxide you exhale when breathing, slowly poisoning you over time. While the majority of pandemic-related conspiracy theories focused on the purported insidiousness of the vaccine, the mask became a cultural symbol on which people projected their emotions about the dire state of the world. For some, the mask indicated the simple desire to protect oneself and those around them from an illness we knew next to nothing about. For others, the mask was an instrument of oppression from a shadowy government, believing that the choice not to wear one was more important than the consequences of infection. Others believe that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American governmental body that led the charge on researching and establishing guidelines regarding coronavirus, including mask mandates, were merely incompetent in managing the pandemic and therefore their advice was not worth heeding. There’s an abundance of anti-mask merchandise, including anti-mask masks, which I find hilarious. Some folks care more about how they appear to others than their actual actions.
Paul Begala, a former Clinton adviser, famously once said that American politics is just theater for ugly people. I think this sentiment also trickles down to the members of the public, who spend a lot of time performing their beliefs for others in their communities, both online and in person. The advent of COVID spiked these attitudes, as many Americans shamed one another for following or not following pandemic precautions. Liberals, who often position themselves as more intelligent and more open-minded than their peers on the other side of the aisle, watched staunch vaccine opponents get infected at high rates and turned a blind eye to their suffering. Alarmingly, some rejoiced, believing their supposed superiority licensed their glee over mass death. A similar attitude developed from conservatives toward those who did get the vaccine, believing that the ~liberals~ would soon endure as-of-yet-unseen debilitating side effects. While Americans are quick to deny humanity to those they dislike, ultimately, COVID does not discriminate on the basis of one’s political party. The only things that reduce a person’s chance of getting coronavirus are vaccinations and boosters, as well as mask-wearing and social distancing. Though many Americans of all affiliations treat the pandemic as though it’s over, at the behest of their community members and the media, those closer to the ruling class still participate in the preventive behaviors we have since shed.
At least once a week I think about this video from Imani Barbarin, a disability justice activist who goes by the username Crutches and Spice for her social media work. In the video she describes the COVID precautions taken by attendees of the 2023 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January, a yearly conference for influential members of world economies, investors, journalists, among others. These safety measures were, in a word, extensive. The elite delegates from hundreds of countries were required to take a COVID test before entering the facility; a positive result (or refusal to test) immediately barred their entry. Attendees were required to wear surgical or N95 masks at all times, and each room had open windows for airflow and a high-efficiency particulate arrestance (HEPA) filter. Barbarin furthers her point by describing how foolish the American public has been with our collective utilization of COVID precautions, likening our rush back toward “normal life” to a short walk toward a guillotine. She informs us that the general public was successfully manipulated by the media and our “experts,” who downplayed the severity of the virus while doing everything possible to safeguard themselves from it behind closed doors. We’re being incentivized to try to relive the pre-pandemic days, but as Barbarin states, after becoming disabled, it’s impossible to make money. The mass disabling of Americans through immunosuppression and long COVID, which parts of the public and even some doctors don’t even believe is real, helps the bottom line of the 1% by keeping the working class stuck in cycles of poverty.
This article is titled “Please Wear a Mask” on purpose. I really do want my readers to consider wearing masks in public indoor spaces, even if they’re the only one to do so. COVID cases in America are on the rise yet again, and the CDC encourages “layered” prevention strategies, which include both vaccinations and, yes, wearing a mask. Masking while in enclosed spaces with others, especially if you don’t know their vaccination status, will help you further minimize your risk of becoming infected and unknowingly infecting others.
When it comes to COVID precautions, no one, not even the most careful, well-intentioned people, have been implementing them perfectly. I certainly haven’t, and I wouldn’t expect the people around me to be perfect either. But as time goes on, and as others around me keep getting COVID, I know that I have to make the right choices if I want to value my health. Please keep yourself and your loved ones safe. The only way to survive this hellscape is by protecting one another.
