#We’re not going back to masks and lockdowns again

Are we really doing this again? Are we really talking about returning to masking? Again?

Last weekend, Los Angeles County reinstituted its mask mandate for indoor settings. More than 60 percent of the county is fully vaccinated, but the mandate applies to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. 

The move is absurd in several ways. For starters, it throws shade on the vaccines. If vaccination works, why do the vaccinated need to be masked? And if we do still need to be masked post-vaccine, why would anyone take the jabs? The vaccinated are protected, and the unvaccinated have had enough time to get vaccinated. We have to move on.

But beyond that, there’s the added question of whether mask mandates have made any difference in containing COVID. 

In March, when Texas and Mississippi dropped their mask mandates, President Joe Biden criticized the moves as “neanderthal thinking” and said it was too soon to stop wearing masks. The blue-check media predicted a COVID holocaust in these states. That didn’t happen. Case numbers collapsed in the months after the mandates ended.

But, as I’ve been writing in these pages all along, we were wearing masks all wrong anyway.

In May 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that a “shocking” 66 percent of those hospitalized for COVID had contracted it in their homes. New York’s mask mandate had started on April 15, 2020. Another 24 percent of patients at that point had also contracted it in their living situation, whether a nursing home or prison.

That didn’t change when lockdowns were eased. By December 2020, New York’s contact-tracing operation showed that “70 percent of new COVID-19 cases originate from households and small gatherings.” And in October, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said it was “small household gatherings” largely driving the uptick of cases in the Garden State. 

It wasn’t passing by someone on the street. It wasn’t shopping or exercising or going to school. It was generally close contact inside homes that continued to spread COVID. Bringing back masks in the low-risk situations will do exactly nothing to stop COVID from spreading in situations such as gatherings with family and friends. 

So why do we keep returning to ineffective mitigation measures like masking in public spaces? It’s as if we have a mental block around the reality that masking like this is largely pointless. 

Sometimes, after my 5-year-old suffers a spill, he requests a Band-Aid, even if nothing is bleeding. It makes him feel better, so I stick a little Batman Band-Aid wherever he wants. But I don’t also stick the Batman Band-Aids all over his siblings, just in case. I don’t force everyone around him into Band-Aids to ease his mental anguish: the equivalent of fearful people forcing the rest of us into masks again. 

“But shouldn’t we do it, just in case?” people ask me. No, we should not. The unnecessary measures and rules are one reason why there is so much mistrust of the vaccines now.

We were told to do pointless things for our own good. We knew these things were irrational, but rules were rules: New York City shut down playgrounds and green spaces but opened up city streets alongside those shuttered playgrounds and green spaces. It was ridiculous, and everyone knew it. We can’t go down the stupid road again.

Twitter: @Karol