Mask ruling creates confusion — what's your take?
Travelers go through the security line at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta on Tuesday, after authorities said masks were optional. Credit: AP/John Spink
The Great Unmasking is underway. Or not.
Such is the state of affairs on a topic that already was a well of confusion even before a federal judge voided the national mask mandate for planes and mass transit.
As the pandemic wanes, and creeps back on the little cat feet of subvariants, the desire for normalcy has surged — complicated by the reality that definitions of normalcy differ even among reasonable people.
Official advice on the topic has been all over the place. Doctors disagree on the wisdom and nuances of this step or that, befitting the communications fog that has marked much of our pandemic response. If the experts can't agree, how can we?
The ruling led to a muddle of mandates canceled, continued, and even cancelled-then-continued. Some pilots announced the end of restrictions midflight. New York City kept its transit mandate in place. Others dropped theirs. Still others seesawed. Suffolk County buses and Long Island MacArthur Airport both dropped mandates only to reinstate them a day later due to a still-existing state mandate — but in the case of the airport, only up to TSA security checkpoints. Philadelphia dropped an indoor mandate it had reinstituted only four days earlier.
The federal government's response was equally confounding. It should have immediately responded in principle to the ruling from a judge who found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, charged with protecting the nation's health, lacked the statutory authority to impose such a mandate. The judge based this on an arbitrarily limited definition of the word "sanitation." But the government waited two days to appeal.
To cap it off, when asked whether people should wear masks, President Joe Biden responded: "That's up to them."
So, dear reader, it's up to you — which some of you insist should have been the case all along. Others, of course, disagree.
But now we're there, more on our own than we've been since the pandemic started, and I, for one, want to understand better how all of us are going to navigate this.
I want to hear from you: When are you going to take your mask off and put it on, and why? I'll feature your answers in a future column so we all can understand better each other's thinking.
Don't, for example, simply tell me that it's your right to not wear a mask. Of course, it is. Tell me how you weigh that right against another person's right to good health — or, perhaps to put it better, how you weigh your right to choose versus the welfare of another who will be affected by your choice?
If you're double-vaxxed and double-boosted and still wearing a mask everywhere, why?
Is there more than a philosophical argument at work? Does it matter if you know someone who died or was seriously ill, someone still suffering, or someone vulnerable? Do those considerations not sway you — and if not, why?
We all have a personal calculus we employ. What's yours?
I have a granddaughter, less than three months old, obviously not vaccinated, whom I see all the time. She's part of my calculus.
So is a niece, 23 years old, healthy and vigorous, vaccinated and boosted, who got a relatively mild case of COVID in November. Now she's suffering a nasty case of long COVID. She can't work, has trouble climbing stairs, experiences shortness of breath and heart palpitations, has an enlarged heart and brain fog, went to an emergency room with strokelike symptoms, and is wracked with pain all over her body.
Send me an email. Let's talk, and learn.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
