The mask debate is over

Jeff Green | Jul 08, 2020

It has been more than sobering for many of us. After a steady, but slow trend towards opening up our lives over a couple of months, during which time COVID-19 cases completely dried up in our region and restaurant patios re-opened, as did most of the retailers who were shuttered for a time, there was an outbreak in a nail salon in Kingston.

As a cluster of cases ensued, a Section 22 order under the Public Health Aid made KFL&A one of the first regions in Ontario where masks must be worn in all commercial establishments.

Why, in the jurisdiction with one of the lowest levels of infection in Ontario, is such a ban necessary here, when it is not in place where the rate is 4 and 5 times as high?

It was Dr. Kieran Moore, the medical officer of health for KFL&A, put the ban in place.

He said that his staff have been preparing for a ban, in the lead up to the phase 2 re-opening of the region, expecting it would be necessary in the early fall as an inevitable second wave of cases hit.

As soon as he found out that 500 people had their nails done at Binh's salon in Kingston during the two weeks when the outbreak was brewing there, he felt he needed to do everything he could to ensure the local infection rate did not jump and jump, and the mask wearing was a key way to control the potential spread.

Mandatory masks are now the order of the day all around us as well, so we are no longer an outlier, just an early adopter of a policy that will remain in place for at least the summer.

In KFL&A there is no time frame for the measure to be reconsidered, and when the ban came in, Dr. Moore said he expects it will remain in place, with possible exceptions, for  a year or longer. In Ottawa and Leeds Grenville Lanark it will be reconsidered on September 15.

Wearing masks in confined settings is a global phenomenon, something that many, smart people, have been doing ever since it was learned that COVID-19 can be spread by people who are not showing symptoms. We have all known, pretty much since early April, that try as we might, maintaining a 2 metre distance in grocery stores and hardware stores and dollar stores and convenience stores, does not always happen. And from my own experience, as the weeks wore on in May and June and we appeared to be living in a big COVID-19 free bubble, those distances have been shrinking week by week in Frontenac County commercial spaces.

Fools, like myself, did not wear masks in stores. We said that the people wearing masks were living in fear of the virus.  But mask wearing does not protect wearer, but everyone else. People like me who were out in the community throughout the pandemic and feeling fine, were exactly the people who should have been wearing a mask to protect those for whom the virus presents a statistically higher risk of devastating consequences.

But we did not. In my office they started calling me 'Donald' because I never put the mask on.

This is why the ban was necessary. There are some of us who are not capable of doing the right thing unless we are forced to do so, and now that we are being forced we are finally doing the right thing.

Our MPP, Randy Hillier, has been consistently railing against the provincial government for the COVID-19 related restrictions. He argues that they infringe on personal freedoms and that the consequences of policies aimed at controlling the pandemic have had more negative consequences on people's lives and health outcomes than the pandemic itself.

It is a difficult argument to prove, because from the beginning, Premier Ford and Prime Minister Trudeau have been saying that they are willing to take strong protective measures and risk people accusing them of being alarmist.

That is fine, but anytime a political leader constructs a narrative whereby their actions cannot be criticized, critics like Hillier play an important role in holding them to account.

In this case there are a couple of factors which make Randy Hillier's argument wholly uncompelling, however.

First, we have a glaring example of the consequences of a less vigorous pandemic response right on our border. On July 6 there were under 300 new cases in Canada and over 47,000 in the United States. Taking population into account, our national infection rate was 6% of the rate in the US that day.

The second factor is that our public health officials have been guided by science, not politics.. These are people who we put in place to be ready to act in our interest, the people we trust in  exactly this kind of situation.

In times like these, we need to have faith in the integrity of our public health officials.  MPP Hillier's propensity to use social media as a venue, and to quote sources supporting his pre-held viewpoint on many matters, do not hold up to scrutiny.

Last week he said in a tweet, “I remain perplexed that by every available model, we have come massively under the apocalyptic projections simply by social distancing, and yet now, more than two months later, we are told we should wear masks.”

There is nothing perplexing here at all. The “apocalyptic projections” did not come to pass because we locked down. To emerge from the lockdown without increasing the spread, we need the distancing and the masking to be in place.

There is a clear trade-off, a difficult one, that we are all navigating; as families, neighbours, communities, regions, provinces, countries and global citizens, between the negative impacts of the pandemic and negative impacts of the economic slowdown and social isolation.

We know that public health officials are in place to provide us with information about the pandemic, its potential for harm, and about the capacity of our health systems to handle the extra burden. Other factors, such as our economic and social well-being, are the responsibility of the politicians we elect.

The opening up we are experiencing is not what we were all hoping for. The new normal is not so normal at all, and seeing a sea of masks in our local stores and the box stores in town is a graphic, jarring example of this. And they are uncomfortable to boot. They are the prerequisite, however, to continued re-opening of businesses.

Four months into this, we are all frustrated. Not only are we all wearing masks in the stifling heat, gypsy moths are devastating our trees and literally falling from the sky onto us, and the crunch under our feet makes a major drought a real possibility. It feels apocalyptic. almost biblical. This is not the life we have become accustomed to over the last 50 years.

But who should we trust, the people who have been working day and night to keep us safe, or a disgruntled politician trying his best to be clever on twitter and embarrass his political enemies?

(Editors note - This is an amended version of this article. The print version, published on July 9, and a previous web version, said that on June 30, KFL&A was the only jurisdiction to mandate masks wearing in commercial settings. We were  subsequently informed, by a reader, that Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health had a very similar order in place on June 12, just as businesses were opening up)