Sure, I'll wear a mask again
In fact, I've already started. Missouri, are you listening?
Prior to being fully-vaccinated in early April, I followed COVID protocols pretty much to the letter. I avoided crowds. I lived in a bubble. I didn’t hug friends. I didn’t even see a lot of my friends. I wore a mask. As the pandemic was (or so I thought) petering out, I bought a ticket to fly to what has become one of the nation’s COVID hotspots in southwest Missouri. Since that trip, I have been tested (twice).
I do not argue about pandemic protocols — which are coming back into place — because I can read. I do not argue about pandemic protocols because I believe my action (or inaction) affects my neighbors. If wearing a mask will help my neighbors, I’ll wear a mask. It isn’t about personal freedom. It’s about living responsibly in a community.
If you are going to whine about having to wear a mask again, and you aren’t vaccinated, bite me. You’re why we are clamping back down. Nearly all hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated, and the states of Florida, Texas and my home state of Missouri account for 40% for all new COVID cases, yet the Ozark Empire Fair is still supposed to open on July 29 in Springfield, Mo., and the event promises to be a super-spreader event for one of the Delta variant’s epicenters.
Facebook has a page for progressive ex-pats and residents of the 417 area code (which includes Springfield, Mo.) and the people on that page post every single reference to their home state with a growing sense of hopelessness. Yay, us, and go, hillbillies.
According to one study, half of Missouri’s workforce are in high- to mid-level economic exposure to COVID. That’s 1.6 million workers in the arts, entertainment, recreation, and food services industries.
This is Missouri’s bicentennial and that can be celebrated, though this is an insane way to do it. The event’s main music attraction, the band Loverboy, has canceled. As the Daily Beast puts it:
A retired Springfield 911 supervisor named Bill Blevins put it another way in a Facebook post.
“Be sure and get in on the Covid-19 Super Spreader event of the summer! Ride the Ventilator!”
But do whinge on about your freedom. Talk more about how important it is to “free the children” from save practices. And then prepare to be locked down, back in your bubble. You can thank your own damn self for that.
A few weeks ago another woman and I were speaking (through our masks) as we browsed a local florist shop. She said, "I am going to keep wearing mine. I didn't even catch a cold last year. This really works!" She is right, it does work. I will continue to wear my mask indoors.
I never stopped masking.
Two days ago, my son fell ill with flu-y symptoms and a fever over 101, so yesterday we went for a COVID test for him. Negative, thank goodness: the doctor told us that there are a lot of viruses-in-general going around now, which I hadn't known.
Republican undergraduates in Michigan told me in the mid-1990s that infection is no longer significant: I haven't heard that directly since, but I suspect that it's still endemic in that population. (Like the bizarre belief that everyone acknowledges that Republicans are The Adults, the Moral Ones. the Fiscally Sane Ones.)
We are subject to a lot of ideological disease as well, I'm afraid not just nationally, but as a pandemic.