Social change, not mask mandates, should be the goal
Midway Staff
Reporter Peter Cox argues that the insistence on mandating masks obfuscates the importance of aligning cultural norms with what is best for public health.
December 15, 2021
Requirements to wear masks in school remain the most visible reminder of the continued impact of the pandemic in many students’ day-to-day lives. Currently Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s order requires anyone who sets foot in a school to wear a face covering.
It isn’t known how long this will remain in effect, but once it expires, our community should be ready to end the mask mandate.
Starting Nov. 1 Hopkinton High School in Massachusetts no longer required students to wear masks while in school, one of the first schools in the country to do so. After this the town of almost 18,000 did see a small increase in cases, but this was mostly attributed to unvaccinated youth outside of school. The example of Hopkinton shows that schools with sufficiently high vaccination rates can function without the requirement for masks.
I don’t think that many people support requiring masks outside of the exceptional times of the pandemic, and most of the country has gotten along fine without them before this. Masks reduce the spread of airborne disease and aren’t much of a discomfort to wear. While it’s certainly better to wear a mask than not to, the main reason why masks hadn’t seen widespread use in the United States was because they weren’t normalized. Masks have been widely accepted in much of East Asia for decades, so it wasn’t a contentious issue in these countries when mandates were introduced at the start of the pandemic. It would be a net positive for us to achieve this kind of normalization of masks in the United States, but that won’t be achieved through mandating mask wearing. Instead, we need to affect cultural change toward mask wearing. Masks are still controversial in much of the country but the pandemic has resulted in a general acceptance of them at our school. It’s likely many people at Lab will continue to wear masks, particularly during flu season.
With the recent emergency authorization of select Covid vaccines for children aged 5-11 and vaccination drive at the school, it is likely the lower school will soon join the middle and high school in being almost totally vaccinated. The only unclear variable at this time is the new omicron variant, though it currently seems that may not be as dangerous as some had predicted. As a community we are rapidly approaching a place where a mask mandate is no longer necessary, though mask wearing should definitely still be encouraged.
