This is a modified version of an article that appeared as a My Turn column in the Daily Item on Sunday, July 19.

Many organizations and institutions have made plans to stay open or reopen in keeping with CDC guidelines.  That is good except for one loophole:  those CDC guidelines rely on a baseline “good behavior” from the population in general.  Specifically, the CDC guidelines these organizations are looking to also recommend AND ASSUME everyone in the community is wearing cloth face coverings when in the presence of others not in their household. 

If those who come into your establishment are not wearing face coverings when warranted in the rest of their daily lives outside of your business, they are undermining the expectations on which your guidelines are based, especially if your business is in a category that does allow people to go maskless at times (restaurants, gyms, daycares).  Even in businesses where masks are required of everyone, the level of risk assumed to be incurred by the ensuing interactions is much higher if the employees or customers in question fail to heed these public health directives at other times. 

To put it bluntly, people not wearing masks, distancing, and stepping up their hygiene on their own are sabotaging the community’s ability to keep the economy moving in the right direction.

If people are “wearing” masks, but not properly, they are undoing everyone else’s effort to keep the economy open.   Many people pull the mask down until the nose is out – that is not wearing a mask.  If that is all you can manage, you’re better off just admitting you’re not wearing a mask.  In that case whenever possible you should use curbside and work-from-home options and stay out of public places.  The level of masking that appears to make a significant difference in COVID-19 transmission is about 80% of the population.  If in fact that many people locally were conscientious about it, that would also allow the relatively few people with legitimate difficulty in wearing a mask to opt out or simply depend on a face shield. 

In a slightly different way, this is playing out in local nursing homes, where the number of cases has grown.  Early on such facilities were endangered by mistaken policies asking them to take in C-19+ patients based on the premise that they already had infection control procedures in place.  The fact that the virus is semi-airborne proved that strategy to be deadly.  At this point, cases arising from that early policy are long past and the transmission in nursing homes like the one in Sunbury is instead a result of employees being infected when off work and then bringing it in to the nursing home from the community. 

Of course, saying “masks, distancing, and hygiene” over and over is a lot easier than making it happen.  None of it feels natural!  Masks make it difficult to see people’s faces, smiles, expressions, and mouths.  They make it harder to hear what others are saying!  Keeping our distance cuts against our social instincts.   We don’t want to back off from a handshake or a hug.   These gestures are important parts of how we communicate.   Sometimes these actions may happen inadvertently as we try to make others comfortable in a given situation.  But we all need to be finding new ways to be comfortable that are more respectful of community health. 

Remember - you don’t know you’re sick until after you’ve been contagious for several days.  Simply telling those who know they are sick to stay home or wear masks makes no sense.  Without constant testing, there is no way of knowing who is spreading it at a given time.  We may hope that everyone who is contagious is already closed off from others, but the reality is that there are people without symptoms who do not know they are sick.  Most will eventually figure it out; some never will.  If you are in this category and not properly wearing a mask, you can be spreading the virus to others.

The fact that the C-19 numbers seem low in our area right now only shows that we had succeeded in avoiding community transmission here through two weeks ago.  But that is no guarantee of future performance.  Two weeks from now we will have a better idea of the consequences of our actions today. 

Take Texas as an example.  In early June the case and death numbers there were descending. Texas reopened and opposed masking.  This set them on the path to the current rise in new cases and hospitalizations.  Since Texas has not required mitigation measures like masks until just recently, they have already locked in at least another three weeks of intensifying misery. 

They didn’t learn from NYC.  NYC didn’t learn from Italy.  Italy didn’t learn from China.  But we could learn from Texas.

We need a multi-pronged approach. 

Individually – Use masks, keep distance, and wash hands.

As a society – Ramp up testing, tracing, and treatment. 

There is no one single solution.  We must work with all of the partial solutions we have available.

ADDENDUM (8/11/2020):

The following has come through our social media channels. There are many very clear local voices calling for the schools to reopen, business as usual to resume, and all these silly masks and distancing ideas to be forgotten. Our response:

As stated previously, we are all in this together. What's more, those objecting simultaneously to restrictions on school reopening and masking don't understand that the rest of us don't want to be in this together with them, but we don't have any choice. In some ways it would be lovely to just go our separate ways and have the people who do not understand the difference between the flu and COVID-19 and who mysteriously refuse to take the simple, low-tech steps we're being asked to do to keep infection at bay just be left to their own devices. There are a couple catches to that, though. 1) In deciding that living normally takes precedent over infection mitigation they are endangering not just themselves, but also the people who are obligated to interact with them in their places of employment, whether that is a store, a school, or a medical facility. 2) If we do just leave them be, even if they manage to carve off some small subset of the medical community that does not find the math of epidemiology compelling, eventually some of them (possibly vast numbers) will need the help of people who are paying attention. And 3) As per item one, their irresponsible behavior is unlikely to stay confined among people devoted to normalcy at all costs or even to those who interact with them directly. The entire issue is that this is a contagious pandemic and those they expose will wind up exposing others.

That not many locally have gotten ill yet, we should all be thankful. But we would really appreciate a little compassion for how complicated things are right now and some effort put towards making things like school possible again. Our numbers locally had been low until August, perhaps largely because of luck and circumstance/isolation. They are rising now. How do we get them to go back down? Mask, distancing and hygiene. (And testing, tracing and treatment, but we do not have as much direct control over that.)

We all want schools to be able to reopen. Let's work together on that. We call on the people most exercised about school reopening to do their part to make it possible. Simply declaring that there isn't an issue doesn't actually make it so. But if we all implement mitigation measures, we can hope to bring the numbers down far enough that we can have nice things -- even in the absence of a vaccine.