When I heard that President Donald Trump had been infected with the coronavirus, one of the first things I did was send a text to my sister-in-law. I wanted to know if the news had changed her mind about wearing masks.
Like all my in-laws (though not my wife), she is a fierce supporter of the president. In the most recent pictures I’ve seen of her, she is wearing a blue T-shirt that says, “Trump 2020. Keep America Great.” She believes that the Democrats want to take away our freedoms and turn the US into a socialist country. She sends me articles with headlines such as “Soros-linked Org Prepares for Election Coup.” She recently texted me a list of Trump’s accomplishments that included 125 separate bullet points, everything from nominating conservative Supreme Court justices to “requiring airports to provide spaces for breast-feeding moms.”
Needless to say, my sister-in-law has been opposed to wearing masks almost since the start of the pandemic. In text and email exchanges over the last month or so, she laid out two primary reasons. The first is that a mask mandate, in her words, “is the biggest violation of my civil liberties.” She added, “I’m not going to be a sheep.” She wears a mask only when she has no other choice — when she is shopping for groceries, for instance — and even then for as brief a time as possible. She links forced mask wearing — and quarantines, for that matter — with an agenda by unseen forces to control us.
“This isn’t about flattening the curve,” she told me a few weeks ago. “It is about control. The death rate isn’t rising. So why are we still living like this?”
Her second reason is that she doubts they make any difference. Although Trump never articulates it precisely this way, it also seems central to his reasoning (along with not wanting to look weak). As he put it in mid-July during an interview with Chris Wallace: “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears.” Or a month later, speaking from the White House: “Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.”
Since the pandemic began, my sister-in-law has seized upon articles and academic studies that debunk the efficacy of masks. A number of them quote reputable scientists who say that cloth masks in particular are unlikely to be effective in blocking aerosol particles that may contain the virus. Other articles claim that N95 masks cause headaches and other health problems.
She sent me an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that included this sentence: “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.” But then I found a follow-up letter to the journal’s editor a few months later by the same authors:
We did state in the article that “wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection,” but as the rest of the paragraph makes clear, we intended this statement to apply to passing encounters in public spaces, not sustained interactions within closed environments. … We therefore strongly support the calls of public health agencies for all people to wear masks when circumstances compel them to be within 6 ft of others for sustained periods.
From where I’m sitting, the number of studies supporting the efficacy of mask-wearing is utterly overwhelming. My sister-in-law finds none of them convincing. And she’s not alone. A Gallup poll in July showed that 18 percent of Americans never or rarely wore a mask outside their homes.
But now Trump has Covid-19, as does his wife.
My sister-in-law has consistently told me that she came to her view about masks independently of Trump. But I have my doubts. Or rather, I should say that I suspect if Trump had been wearing a mask to set an example for the country — and if he had backed up his government scientists in stressing the importance of masks — she wouldn’t have felt the need to seek out articles debunking them. In all likelihood, Trump supporters like her would have accepted the need for masks in the same way they accept the need for seat belts or helmets when riding a bike. The issue would never have become politicized.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle estimates that the US is on track to register almost 372,000 deaths from Covid-19 by the end of the year. But if 95% of the population wore masks, IHME estimates that number would drop to 275,000. That is an awful lot of lives. And just think about how many lives could have been saved — and how many people could have avoided becoming sick — if everyone had worn masks starting in March.
Has my sister-in-law changed her mind about masks now that Trump himself has been infected? Alas, she has not. “If masks work, then why are the positive cases rising everywhere?” she wrote to me in a text Friday morning. “I stay six feet away from most people in public, but most people I know don’t wear them in their ‘circle’ at work or family.” She added, “Show me some science on masks and I’d accept it and comply.”
At his age, and being as overweight as he is, Trump is among the most vulnerable population. As much as I dislike him, I do hope he recovers. And what then? Will he finally acknowledge that he — and everyone else in the White House — should have worn masks? And that masks save lives?
Knowing him, he probably won’t. But it scarcely matters. The damage has already been done.
Bloomberg
