Difficult these days not to tense up when seeing the mask timidly reappear in the metro, at work, at the restaurant. Narrated by The dutythe refusal to allow an employee to wear it, while COVID is slowly regaining ground, has highlighted an aberration which says a lot about our twisted relationship with this precious tool taken from our preventive arsenal.
You do not dream. After tearing ourselves apart over the right to refuse the compulsory wearing of a mask, we are now fighting over the exact opposite. There is something truly surreal about noting that we are still so ill-equipped to assess the merits of such a practice and make a decision on the matter. Will three years of the pandemic leave us as ignorant as on the first day?
One of the great mirages that we will have been told at the end of the long pandemic that kept us on alert for months is that with the endemic phase, we could finally breathe and “live with” COVID. Let’s agree, this is not false. But in doing so, we have knowingly avoided the need to specify that “living with it” does not mean abandoning all principles of precaution and good citizenship.
At the limit, we could even zap COVID from the equation that the conclusion would not change one iota. We can wear the mask to protect ourselves, because we are immunocompromised, for example; like we can wear it to protect others, because we have symptoms of an infectious disease, like the flu or respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and we don’t want to pass it on to the next person.
A trifle, these evils? Each year in Canada, seasonal flu is estimated to cause approximately 12,200 hospitalizations and 3,500 deaths. As for RSV, there is no need to go far back in time to measure its devastating effects on access to care. Last year, a wave of hospitalizations driven by a tsunami of respiratory viral infection caused a “disaster” out of a “horror film” in pediatric emergencies, to use the words of our collaborator, the emergency pediatrician. Samir Shaheen-Hussain. The VRS played one of the leading roles there.
That said, even if we want to skip it (and there is no shortage of desire), COVID is still there, with new variants and yet another vaccination campaign in preparation. For the most vulnerable, this is still not a trifle. On Friday, the Minister of Health, not wanting to “worry the population”, still wanted to give the truth. The number of patients admitted to hospital and infected with the coronavirus tripled in three weeks to reach 881, as of September 6, with a small handful (19) in intensive care.
The minister did not venture to construct scenarios. He returned the hot potato to the national director of public health, who will be responsible for issuing his recommendations for the fall. Drilling the abscess surrounding the wearing of the mask appears to be an imperative. Just like better regulating the right to wear a mask at work.
In many countries, especially Asian, wearing a mask is uninhibited. Thus, no one jumps or protests when they see a mask, because wearing it is seen as an elementary, natural and even desirable preventive gesture. There, we decided: when health is at stake, collective interests prevail over individual impulses. Here, wearing a mask has been exploited and politicized excessively to the point of making it a grenade that is still difficult to defuse today.
Both our leaders and the health authorities are to blame for this failure. If our relationship to the mask is so problematic, it is partly because we have done everything to disgust us with it. They first wanted us to believe that its virtues supported by science were overrated and that, even in a pandemic, we did not need it, because it was too imperfect a shield. By our fault, too! Since we were judged to be philistine in this matter, we concluded that we would necessarily use it incorrectly and that, in doing so, the mask would do us collectively more harm than good.
The health authorities had to pedal hard to defuse this dangerous bomb. Good princes, a majority of us accepted without too much complaint to see the mask erected as a weapon of massive protection. The compass of science, after all, had not really moved. It’s public health’s trust in our collective wisdom that has made a 180-degree turn.
Despite this about-face, we understand that the malaise persists in the population. The return to a certain normality, at least on the viral level, is a relief for everyone. While the season of respiratory illnesses awaits us, let’s not waste this breath of fresh air by replaying the bad film that pitted us against each other. Getting vaccinated, washing your hands, wearing a mask, isolating yourself or ventilating are preventive actions that cannot be normalized. They must also be protected from excessive political fever and knee-jerk individual reactions.