Issue 55: Dismantling The Social World Covid Built
5.15.21 | Why some people will resist unmasking
Hello,
Today there are fewer people hospitalized with Covid in the U.S. than there have been at any point since early April of 2020, well before the first wave of our outbreak crested. The number of newly reported Covid cases across the country has fallen by a third in the last two weeks, and looks to continue falling. Meanwhile the falloff in vaccinations has stabilized with the rate leveling at just above two million new doses administered every day. A scientific consensus is emerging that the vaccines are highly effective against all of the current variants of concern in terms of preventing serious illness, hospitalization, and death, and that vaccinated people who do contract the disease have viral loads low enough that they are highly unlikely to transmit the virus to people around them.
So the surprise announcement by CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky Thursday that fully vaccinated people can go unmasked and stop social distancing even indoors in large groups is grounded in the medical science. But from the standpoint of social science and science communications the agency seems to be guided by the same sloppy intuition it’s used around mask recommendations in particular since the pandemic began — not a great showing from an agency working hard to regain its credibility.
Here’s the thing. Over the last twelve months mask wearing has, gradually, painfully and unevenly, become institutionalized in much of the country. Like all social institutions it’s a structure built out of formal rules and laws, but also local social norms, habits, rituals, and material objects (next winter, for example, many of us are going to pull our coats out of storage, stuff our hands in the pockets and find an old mask there, stirring memories of the pandemic).
Masking is not a switch you can turn on and off, it’s more like a building we’ve constructed and inhabit together. Now that the institution of mask wearing is beginning to outlive its usefulness, taking it apart safely and effectively requires a bit of controlled demolition. That’s not what we got from the CDC this week.
Thursday’s mask announcement falls short on a number of levels. For individuals, it kicks up a fair bit of confusion about what’s safe and what isn’t — what if you’re a person with kids at home or if you work in a childcare or educational setting? What if you’re immunocompromised? How safe are you if you’re regularly coming into contact with unvaccinated people who are also unmasked? How can you trust that people you encounter who aren’t masked are vaccinated? (Some good answers to these questions can be found here).
That last question, about how to know who’s vaccinated or not, poses a major problem for businesses and other organizations that will now be left to sort out for themselves how and whether to enforce indoor mask mandates with or without some kind of scheme to verify people’s vaccination status. The most at-risk group here will be, once again, frontline workers — the Union of Food and Commercial Workers put out a statement criticizing the CDC for failing to consider how the guidance change “will impact essential workers who face frequent exposure to individuals who are not vaccinated and refuse to wear masks. Millions of Americans are doing the right thing and getting vaccinated, but essential workers are still forced to play mask police for shoppers who are unvaccinated and refuse to follow local Covid safety measures. Are they now supposed to become the vaccination police?”
How to formulate and enforce these new rules on a local level is by no means an unsolvable problem, except that the CDC didn’t bother to let anyone know that this guidance update was coming, and didn’t set any benchmarks for when, where and how it should be implemented. That means new policies will have to be improvised after the fact, an approach that, we were supposed to have learned from the Trump-era pandemic control failures, is less than ideal.
Apparently the CDC didn’t even do the nation’s governors the courtesy of a head’s up about the guidance, which left elected leaders all the way down to the local level scrambling to adapt under pressure, scotching the possibility of coordinated, informed decision-making. In this scrum Maryland’s governor, for example, simply repealed his state’s mask mandate for all people, vaccinated or not.
Some of the CDC’s rationale for relaxing its mask guidance for the vaccinated is that doing so could act as an incentive for people to get their shots. And maybe “vaxx or mask” would be an effective strategy if vaccination status was broadly verifiable, or if community-wide vaccination rates were tied to reopening plans. But they’re not. And in fact North Carolina’s governor, who had previously said he would lift Covid restrictions in his state only once two-thirds of adults had received one dose of the vaccine, yesterday lifted all restrictions anyway after the CDC announcement.
So the most consequential effect of the CDC’s guidance so far seems to be that it substantially destabilized the structure of formal rules that had been propping up mask wearing. This isn’t great, because we know that masking is effective at controlling the spread of the virus, and most people around nationwide are still unvaccinated.
Still, other pillars supporting mask wearing remain. People’s individual habits and preferences and their local social norms will in some places sustain masking indoors and out for some time to come. This isn’t necessarily only about fear of catching the virus. Some people wear a mask as a sign of courtesy to others around them. Others, because they don’t want to be perceived as Covid-deniers.
Some people, as Julia Carrie Wong writes in this excellent piece, simply like the anonymity and freedom from emotional labor that wearing a face covering in public or on the job provides. For the people Wong interviewed, continuing to wear a mask is a recognition of “the fact that there are more things that can hurt them than viruses, including the aggressive or unwelcome attention of other people – or even any attention at all.” The quotes are striking and revealing:
“It’s a common consensus among my co-workers that we prefer not having customers see our faces,” said Becca Marshalla, 25, who works at a bookstore outside Chicago. “Oftentimes when a customer is being rude or saying off-color political things, I’m not allowed to grimace or ‘make a face’ because that will set them off. With a mask, I don’t have to smile at them or worry about keeping a neutral face.”
“I have had customers get very upset when I don’t smile at them,” she added. “I deal with anti-maskers constantly at work. They have threatened to hurt me, tried to get me fired, thrown things at me and yelled ‘fuck you’ in my face. If wearing a mask in the park separates me from them, I’m cool with that.”
Aimee, a 44-year-old screenwriter who lives in Los Angeles, said that wearing a mask in public even after she’s been vaccinated gives her a kind of “emotional freedom”. “I don’t want to feel the pressure of smiling at people to make sure everyone knows I’m ‘friendly’ and ‘likable’,” she said. “It’s almost like taking away the male gaze. There’s freedom in taking that power back.”
In the end, the CDC’s recklessness on this issue might not have any decisive effect on the course of the pandemic. But mask wearing is just one of the many pandemic-related social adaptations whose obsolescence we’ll have to navigate as the virus recedes here. Covid has been with us for long enough, and the dislocations it brought to economic and social life severe enough, that it has sparked a major reassessment among workers about what kinds of jobs and careers they want to have, what kind of treatment they’ll put up with on the job, and how much of their personal lives they’re willing to sacrifice to their employers.
There are the practical challenges to ending the pandemic: the new laissez-faire approach to masking, coming as it does well before even half of the country is fully vaccinated, could prolong viral transmission here. Dismantling the social world the pandemic built will take even longer, and is fraught with its own hazards and blind alleys, some of which I’ll write more about in the weeks to come.
That’s it for this week. Share the newsletter with a friend if you find it helpful, sign up through the link below if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you in your inbox next Saturday.