In recent weeks, mask mandates in the United States are being gradually removed. As of yesterday (Feb 18), more than forty states have dropped mask requirements; only California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii maintain some kind of mask mandate for certain situations, most of which involved unvaccinated people. In fact, it appears that Hawaii is the only state which hasn’t set a date for the eventual lifting of the requirement to wear a mask.
It is interesting to note that the removal of masks mandates is occasioned by none other than the Omicron surge, in which hospitalizations and deaths have been decoupled from admittedly high positive test cases. Since masks are meant to prevent spread, it follows that IF spread has no longer any major impact on the healthcare system, THEN ‘preventing spread’ is no longer a priority.
Ergo, masks needn’t be a priority anymore.
Nevertheless, there remains many voices who believe that mask mandates are important. Not least of all, in Malaysia most people are far removed from the American situation in that we still believe in wearing masks and we want our children masked, too.
I’m no scientist or epidemiologist but I’d like to summarize what many experts are saying about the case against mask mandates. Since Malaysia’s vaccination rates are very high and we’re now hit with Omicron, I figure this is a good time to examine this issue closer.
The case for mask mandates, at first sight, appears intuitive.
With such a highly transmissible variant like Omicron, it only makes sense for everyone to be masked in order to better contain the virus. Masks appear even more critical for the reopening of schools, as each school is potentially a super-spreader given how children like to play and gather in groups with minimal regard for social distancing. This could be even more urgent if one has an elderly or immuno-compromised member of the family whom the child goes back to.
This reasoning sounds airtight. Or does it?
First, the risk of children suffering serious illnesses from Covid-19 (let alone the Omicron strain) is infinitesimal. Yes, tragically about thirty children in Malaysia died of Covid over the past 6 months or so. But when you realise that over a hundred and thirty thousand of them were infected, the Covid fatality rate for kids (being lower than 0.01%), hardly lends support to the view that children are in serious risk from the virus.
Granted that yes our social media feeds continue giving the impression that we must fear for our children, the data, however, does not. And if not, if the risk to children is negligible, why subject millions of healthy children to forced masking? Why not give parents the option of deciding if their child should or shouldn’t wear one?
Likewise, the same is true of vaccinated adults. Once a person is fully vaxxed, masks become even less necessary especially if the priority objective is to eradicate serious illnesses and sustain the healthcare system instead of merely ‘flattening the curve’.
To reiterate an earlier point, the reason why mask mandates (and Covid restrictions in general) are dropping (at least in Europe and the USA) is because curve-flattening is no longer associated with saving the healthcare system. Since Covid or Omicron has been ‘priced into’ the healthcare system, it would’ve become just like any other disease prior to 2020 i.e. no need for mandates or restrictions which affect the whole country.
But what about people who remain unvaxxed?
Well, clearly they will be at higher risks than vaxxed folks but, and I know this sounds tough, perhaps after all this time we should learn to respect their decision and accept the fact that they’re willing to take that risk. This is even more possible now because when a majority of people have been vaccinated, the healthcare system is already ‘safe’.
But what about the immuno-compromised or the elderly or those with co-morbidities who have been vaccinated but are still at risk?
This is, unfortunately, the kind of decision societies make all the time. Do we have to make policies which affect a majority of the population because of a minority? It’s not always a No, hence the need for thinking. For this issue, however, given vaccines and the availability of more treatments for Covid19 (dexamethasone, methylprednisolone, ibuprofen, etc.), would it be the most rational thing to do to make millions of people wear masks indefinitely, especially when not everybody uses N95 masks which is like the only kind of mask which stops Omicron?
A final problem with mandates in general is that they’re the antithesis of the idea that people should be given enough information to help them make their own decisions about their own health. This kind of blunt tool messaging may erode public trust and will have bad consequences for future public health policies.
Maybe this is why the United States, which had earlier pushed so hard for compulsory masking, is finally easing up this approach. With compulsion comes a loss of trust — to maintain power in a democracy, you just can’t have too much of trust, can you?
