At the last doctor’s appointment before my February 2020 kidney transplant, I was warned of my future vulnerability to viruses. The flu had been known to take transplant patients out, the doctor said, and even the common cold had sent some to the hospital. As thorough as my medical team members were in preparing me to navigate the world with a weakened immune system, they couldn’t have prepared me for the world that suddenly materialized: one scattered with people who have decided that a deadly pandemic doesn’t warrant a defensive response, who are openly scornful of those trying to avoid infection.
My worries about the virus itself have competed with my worries about the accelerated decline of basic decency.
Add to that a pervasive Orwellian attitude that some deaths are more equal than others — that, for instance, my death from Covid wouldn’t illustrate the deadliness of the pandemic like the death of somebody from the two-good-kidneys community would — and you can understand why in these past two years my worries about the virus have competed with my worries about the accelerated decline of basic decency.
Soon after my transplant, I began leading a newsroom covering Louisiana state government, but I worked remotely and rarely visited the Capitol out of fear of being near those Republican lawmakers who eschewed masks. They didn’t budge after their colleagues and their spouses began getting sick (some fatally); they didn’t budge despite knowing that one of their colleagues had had a kidney transplant. During a committee hearing over a bill, one such lawmaker against masks described himself as a victim: “Personally, I don’t wear a mask,” he said, “and I get discriminated against.”
However, since the start of the pandemic some of us have had the good fortune to live in places where local and state officials have taken Covid-19 mitigation efforts, including school and restaurant closures, crowd size restrictions and mask mandates, seriously. Even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been overruled by partisans and has just as often botched its Covid messaging, the agency has generally stressed the need for individuals to take precautionary measures. The fact that many have made it a point to disregard official guidance doesn’t lessen the importance of such guidance. What leaders say matters, which means more people will wear masks when government officials say it’s needed than if they don’t.
How dispiriting, then, that in a country where more than 2,000 people are dying daily of Covid that the few mask mandates that remain seem soon to be lifted by state officials. At the same time, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has said the agency could update its guidance on masking this week. According to a Feb. 15 NBC News report, “The White House has been eager for the CDC to provide an update on its indoor mask recommendation, although it wants the agency to get it right and it doesn’t want to appear as though it is putting political pressure on the agency.”
I don’t read that as the White House not wanting to pressure the CDC but as the White House not wanting to be caught doing so. I also read the report of the Biden administration’s eagerness for new guidance as pressure itself because if new guidance was actually needed, wouldn’t an independent and scientifically rigorous CDC issue such guidance without prompting?
According to the current guidance, we should be wearing masks wherever there is “substantial or high” transmission of the virus, which, as of Thursday, included 98 percent of U.S. counties. Why should we trust any recommendation that masks are no longer needed if the transmission rate is still that high and that many people are still dying? If such a recommendation is issued with numbers as high as these, why shouldn’t it be categorized as the same kind of disregard for the public’s health that the inveterate mask opponents have shown?
According to the current guidance, we should be wearing masks wherever there is “substantial or high” transmission of the virus, which, as of Thursday, was 98 percent of U.S. counties.
In a Feb. 9 NBC News story about the growing fears among people with an increased risk of experiencing severe Covid complications, Jeremy Max, the executive director at the Living Independence Network in Idaho, said that he’s had a hard time asking people at greater risk to advocate publicly for themselves lest they be attacked for doing so. As residents of a mostly rural state, Idahoans have a tradition of looking out for one another, Max said. But now? “People come up and literally say that they’re not responsible for a [disabled] person’s well-being. It just is like we have done an 180 in terms of how we think and care about one another.”
My wife wears a mask for her own sake. But she also wears one to reduce the likelihood that she’ll get infect me. “You know you don’t have to wear that anymore,” a stranger told her Saturday. Later that same day, another unknown person sneered at her when he saw her and muttered, “Such a sheep.” That’s the world my family and I have to navigate, one where the precautions we take to avoid a deadly infection are as likely to be mocked as they are supported.
All past pandemics have come to an end, and there’s no reason to believe that this one will be different. But until then, how many more will be added to this country’s toll of nearly 930,000? How many of those deaths might we have prevented if we hadn’t treated those who are vulnerable as less valuable? Perhaps, most importantly, when the pandemic is over, is there any hope of getting that lost decency back?
