It’s been a big news item the last couple of days that the final major mask mandates, on airplanes and public transportation, have ended. Even here in Fairfax County, Virginia, where most people have followed the pandemic rules, masks have been coming off over the last couple of months or so. I usually write about urbanism and land use—I describe this newsletter as “mostly-urbanism”—but from time to time I touch on other issues, and this is one of those pieces.

I have no strong feelings about the end of the transportation mask mandates; they can’t last forever, but people should be charitable and considerate for others, and not cavalier about risks to themselves. (And if you’re going to wear a mask, wear an N95, which we should have all been wearing all along.)

My strongest feeling about everything to do with the pandemic is dismay at how quickly and completely it became yet another partisan culture war issue, rather than an opportunity to address fundamental issues like industrial capacity, disaster preparedness, and what looks like dangerously low levels of solidarity. Some pundits these days, mostly on the right, like to talk about “decadence”—but what’s more decadent than forcing a once-in-a-century public health crisis with a death toll of a million people into a bunch of culture-war templates and narratives? And, as I’ll elaborate below, I don’t think the public health messaging and guidance was blameless.

I’ve written a fair amount over the last year about the pandemic, but I’ve got a few more thoughts that this news item occasions. The pandemic was Trump’s Iraq and Katrina rolled into one. A lot of people point to the turnaround on masks in spring of 2020 as the moment when public trust in public health guidance went south for good. That may be true, and that was a blunder.

But the original sin was the fact that we were unable to manufacture enough medical-grade respirators in the first place. It’s ironic that Trump was handed an event that allowed him to do two of his favorite things—side-eye China and talk up American industrial capacity—and he whiffed. The fact that Republicans didn’t lose trust in him the way they did in the public health agencies was also dismaying.

Pretty much ever since that moment in spring or early summer of 2020, when the initial frisson of crisis wore off for a lot of people and the pandemic response discourse became politicized, I’ve wondered if anything could have changed that outcome. Maybe getting the mask guidance correct—or at least consistent—from the start would have saved some credibility.

I can remember some progressives on Twitter in February or March of 2020 downplaying COVID and cautioning against using masks; a month or two later, their script flipped. And some of the first folks to sound the warning on COVID, back December or January, were right-wingers. It was a strange thing to watch unfold.

I’ve heard the sentiment, too, that the issue was less the evolving guidance but the apparent attitude or tone. What would have happened if the message had consistently been from the start something to the effect of, “We don’t know how severe of a crisis this is going to be, or how long it will last. We will be learning as fast as we can, but we don’t know everything. In fact, right now, we don’t know that much more than you. We are public servants who work for you; please be patient and bear with us as knowledge and guidance changes, evolves, or reverses as we learn more.”

Would that sort of humility have mattered? I don’t know. I’d like to think it might have. Perhaps it was there, and even I missed it.

Some people have seen “lockdowns” as verging on conspiracies—something like “lockdowns were about letting criminals and questionable people run wild while locking up good ordinary people,” or some such. Some have argued that the United States copied the lockdown response from China, insinuating that it was tyrannical.

But as a matter of law, what we called “lockdowns” were actually shelter-in-place orders. I think that reveals something important. You’ve heard of them before—they’re the emergency orders issued during natural disasters, like tornadoes. In my region, Maryland Republican governor Larry Hogan was the first executive to issue a shelter-in-place order. That makes me think that the initial belief was that we would face a short, acute crisis. If anyone was expecting a long semi-acute semi-crisis, it didn’t make it to the leadership class.

One thing we’ll have to think about is whether or to what extent these short-term, acute emergency powers were stretched too much to cover an event like the pandemic. Another thing we’ll have to think about is how a country with such a strong emphasis on individual rights and liberties can address a long, grinding, fundamentally collective problem like this.

I’ve happily worn a mask indoors for two years—I got my hands on N95 respirators while the guidance was still against them. Most people in Northern Virginia have complied too, and continued to wear them after the mandates lifted. However, when my wife and I were in Lancaster, Pennsylvania this last February, I got a glimpse of a different world. We waited in line half an hour to get into one of the Amish “smorgasbord” buffet restaurants. A few people, mostly older folks, were wearing masks, presumably high-quality ones to protect themselves. Everybody else was maskless. Lots of kids were running around, touching stuff, being kids.

It felt a little weird—but also sort of instinctively normal, like practically picking up where you left off with an old friend. I don’t think masks are tyranny, I think N95s in crowded indoor spaces are a pretty good idea, and while I don’t think I’m at much risk myself anymore, with a weaker variant and three shots in, I’m happy to wear one.

I do, however, wish that everybody, whatever their politics, had been willing to both comply with temporary, unprecedented public health rules on the one hand, and understand that they were temporary, and demand as such, on the other. I hope that reduced human interaction and reduced physical connection with each other and the world is not permanent. And I hope we eventually get back to that scene at the Lancaster buffet—the old normal—being our new normal, too.

Social card image credit Flickr/7C0, CC BY 2.0

Related Reading:

Breaking the Fever

Pandemic Memories

The Great Unsettledness

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