You Don’t Have the Right Not to Wear a Mask in Public!
Your uncovered mouth can literally kill
I was threatened with death in my own home yesterday.
The person who did it was a delivery man for a well-known chain of home improvement stores who came to install a new refrigerator. From the moment he walked into my kitchen, I knew he was trouble.
He didn’t seem particularly angry or aggressive, and I didn’t see that he was carrying a gun or a knife. But one look at him convinced me that he represented a mortal danger to me and my family.
You see, this guy dared to come into my home not wearing a mask.
As soon as I saw his face, the first thing I said to him was, “Don’t you have a mask?”
He just shook his head and mumbled, “No.”
I should have asked him to leave right then, but I was so shocked I didn’t think quickly enough to do it.
After exchanging a few words with me about the refrigerator he was bringing and the one that would be taken away, he went out to get his partner. When they came back in, I was even more shocked.
Now they were both wearing masks.
That made it clear: they had been issued masks, but just didn’t bother to put them on until confronted about it. In other words, they didn’t really care about my safety or that of my family. Or maybe they just didn’t believe this whole coronavirus thing. In any case, avoiding the discomfort of wearing a mask was more important to them than the fact that they could kill us by their failure to do so.
Your mask is for my protection, not yours!
Sometimes people have the attitude that because they are willing to take their chances with the virus, it’s their choice whether to wear a mask or not. What they don’t get is that the purpose of the mask isn’t to protect them, but to protect the people around them that they could infect. In an article on their website, Cedars Sinai Hospital says:
“Wearing a mask will keep respiratory secretions within that barrier and help protect others if you’re sick with COVID-19, even if you have minimal or no symptoms.”
So, your choice not to wear a mask when you are around me isn’t about you — it’s about the threat you represent to me. It’s quite possible that you literally have my life not in your hands, but in your mouth.
Without a mask you can kill just by talking
On the same day our deliveryman showed up not wearing the mask he obviously had in his truck, the Washington Post featured a story with the headline:
“Experiment shows human speech generates droplets that linger in the air for more than 8 minutes”
The point of the story is that new research indicates that just by talking in an enclosed space, our mouths can spew out a cloud of “oral fluid droplets” that “could potentially contain enough virus particles to represent an infectious dose.”
One hopeful finding of the research is that loud speech produces the most droplets, so hopefully conversation carried on at a normal level may not be as dangerous. But if you’re not wearing a mask, even that represents a totally unnecessary danger.
This isn’t about civil liberties — it’s about not killing other people!
For weeks, now, groups in several states have been staging public demonstrations to protest what they consider to be violations of their civil liberties due to COVID-19 restrictions. In many cases, the people who show up for these protests want to show their resistance not only against official stay-at-home mandates from state or local officials, but also against the whole idea of being required to change what they do because of the virus. So, in their demonstrations they deliberately flout the social distancing and mask-wearing recommendations of the health professionals. “IT’S MY RIGHT!” they say.
But the rest of us also have rights — including the right to not be assaulted and possibly killed by you exercising your right to not cover your face.
This isn’t about politics or civil liberties! It’s about consideration for others.
I am someone who is past his 70th birthday, and who has several of the underlying health issues that make a person especially at risk if they contract COVID-19. So my interest in this is intensely personal. But we now know that younger adults with no apparent underlying conditions, and even young children are at mortal risk from this disease.
Even if you think being asked to practice social distancing and to wear a mask are violations of your civil liberties, couldn’t you voluntarily and temporarily yield some of those rights to help keep the rest of us safe?