BY JACK DEVINE
Mandated public masking did more harm than good.
As we tip-toe back to “normalcy,” one vestige of the painful pandemic keeps hanging around. It’s the MASK, the ubiquitous, irritating, virtue-signaling — and largely ineffective — COVID shield.
I suspect that years from now, when COVID anxiety is a thing of the past, the masks will be our most vivid, visceral memory — the protective measure that outlasted sanitizing sprays, two-minute hand-washing, social distancing, vaccination cards, and even lockdowns. Masks were the most visible, most pervasive, and arguably the most politicized of mandated COVID protective measures.
And they were the least effective.
That point will be debated for sure, and there’s still much to be learned from the pandemic. But after two years, the accumulated data on public masking speaks for itself. Rates of COVID hospitalization and death have been essentially the same in the cities, states, and countries that imposed strict masking requirements as in those that imposed none. Masking seems not to have helped at all, anywhere.
