This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made a head spinning about-face on wearing masks. For months it insisted that only medics and symptomatic patients needed to wear them; indeed, it even chastised non-medics who did for causing life-threatening shortages.
But now, warning that mere breathing can spread the coronavirus, the CDC is advising everyone who goes outside to wear them. Period.
So, are you prepared to wear one every time you go outside for the rest of your life? After all, it’s now self-evident that the coronavirus will not take a summer break as President Trump once assured the nation.
Or, are you like him; so vain you think it’s better to look good than to be safe?
Of course, apropos of shoes, you can bet your life that, just as 9/11 made taking them off a pre-condition for boarding planes, COVID-19 will make wearing masks a pre-condition for boarding them.
Meanwhile, I warned at March 31 below about the “untenable precedent” leaders were setting with their shutdown and stay-at-home orders. This new CDC recommendation is just one way their chickens are already coming home to roost.
Like most people, you’re probably jonesing to watch professional sports (in person or on TV). And you’re probably thinking that the logical extension of the CDC’s recommendation is that nobody will be allowed to enter any public arena anywhere without wearing a mask.
But surely it must extend above all to requiring the heavy-breathing players in those arenas to wear them during play, no? Forget Trump’s suicidal vanity! Think, for example, about the cost-benefit analysis of NBA action resuming under such conditions.
Can you see LeBron, Steph, Giannis, Kwahi, et al. all playing with masks…?
Again, the issue is not whether such extreme requirements will become necessary to fight this pandemic. It’s whether political leaders are bothering to warn that such will become facts of life in our brave new world once they lift their stay-at-home orders.
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