Last week, the University of California, Irvine and the San Diego Unified School District returned to mandatory masking. And all of Los Angeles County is expected to bring back its mask mandate this Friday, “absent a sudden turnaround in Covid tracking metrics,” the New York Times reported. “It would apply to indoor shops, offices, events, schools and more. The order would be rescinded once case levels begin to drop again.” The move, notably, has been endorsed by such high-level public-health officials as White House Covid coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. Anthony Fauci himself has been calling for a return to indoor mask mandates on a broad scale, telling CNN earlier this month that Americans “really should, in an indoor setting, a congregant setting, be wearing masks — it’s just the appropriate thing to do to protect yourself and your family, and those around you.”
Are rolling mask mandates going to go on ad infinitum? We’re reasonably confident that Covid, in some form, is here to stay; we’re no longer discussing “shutting down the virus,” as then-candidate Biden promised, but instead getting accustomed to living with it. For certain blue-state areas, spurred on by the counsel of public-health officials, living with it increasingly looks like recurring periods of masking amid Covid spikes, although it’s not clear how widely the practice will spread. (For now, it seems confined to California.) That’s a new development — we’ve been living with bad flu seasons from time immemorial, for example, but masks were never part of the conversation. Now that the door has been opened to mandating face-coverings as part of the public-health toolkit, however, it seems likely that local authorities in progressive areas will view them as a legitimate response to spikes.
I haven’t worn a mask for many months now, save for one short visit to a doctor’s office where I was asked to put one on. I don’t plan to in the future, either — and I suspect many Americans feel the same way. If blue cities, which are already seeing an exodus of residents tired of deteriorating living conditions, are determined to make life even more miserable, at varying intervals, for their citizens, that’s their prerogative. But no matter what Fauci says, it hardly seems wise.