The strange theatre of mask-wearing

However surreal and dystopian the pandemic landscape seemed at first, no enduring vista feels ‘surreal’ and ‘dystopian’ indefinitely. Citizenries uniformly obliterating their faces with ear-to-ear muzzles has come to seem par for the course. But I’m still amazed by how eagerly a certain segment has embraced masking in public, especially in the US. More perplexingly still, many of these people regard any release from mask mandates as an attempt to take something precious away from them. They recall a certain kind of belligerent animal that gets trapped in a cage, and when you open the door it glooms in a corner and refuses to leave.

Witness the response last week when America’s Centers for Disease Control announced that there’s no need for fully vaccinated individuals to wear masks, other than in a handful of circumstances (e.g. on planes and public transport, where frankly there’s no scientific justification for the vaccinated to mask up, either). Twitter exploded in outrage. How dare you allow us to go shopping without snot continuously drooling from our noses that we can’t even wipe away! We love running and cycling in a state of oxygen deprivation! Are you seriously proposing we go back to interacting with fellow human beings as if they’re anything other than repulsive bipedal pustules that weep disease?

I realise this risks the long arm of Big Tech reaching through my study window to clutch my throat, but: the case for masks making a better than negligible difference to the spread of Covid-19 has always been crap. From extremely weak data, even Sage quotes their prevention value at a miserable 6 to 15 per cent. Mask mandates were initially justified by fairytale computer modelling. But we now have hard evidence in the real world, where there’s been no clear correlation between masking and infection rates, hospitalisations or Covid deaths.