The Great Unmasking: What the Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic Taught Me About Us
As 2022 closed, I looked back over the pandemic and ruminated about how to write about it, there was one topic looming large: Covid-19 denialism. It was frightening to watch the kooks and cranks declaring masks âTyranny!â gain traction and followers. They werenât the biggest problem, though. The ship turned into the path of the iceberg when most of the worldâs leaders declared the pandemic âoverâ â facts to the contrary be damned. The waves of death and mass disablement simply werenât discussed in polite circles anymore. Masks became faux pas â the uniform of those âliving in fear and anxiety,â those who are "crying wolf.â I often felt mad as I lived through and watched this real-life fable unfold. I was reminded that we often forget the most important lesson of the tale of âThe Boy Who Cried Wolfâ: There really was a wolf to be kept away from the flock. There still is a wolf in Covid, and the lie being told isnât one of a child seeking attention, it is of adults who want things to go back to ânormal.â
Normal. Itâs an innocuous word that speaks to baselines, familiarity, and safety. People want to go back to pre-pandemic times, where it was easier to pretend everything was fine (it wasnât). The pandemic has taught me that normalcyâs value is in the pretense of safety it provides. I was woefully naive about how vitally important that false veneer is to so many people. I believed that with mass disablement and death on the table, something as simple as wearing a mask wouldnât be a tough ask. If you thought masks werenât working well enough, the solution wasnât to toss them, it was to demand better protection from higher quality masks â N95s, etc. I knew there would be resistance from certain quarters. You canât tell a certain kind of person anything, and they refuse to be protected from themselves. What I didnât expect was for public health officials to botch so badly the messaging around the necessity of masking and other mitigations to reduce the risk of spreading a dangerous contagion. I didnât expect this total collapse of political will. I didnât expect basic common sense to be jettisoned, much less the fundamentals of public health.Â
I could never have predicted such a parlous failure rooted in abandoning most of the world to a future of âliving with covidâ with no meaningful mitigation strategy beyond vibes and capitalism. Then, I thought about the contrasting visual representations of prosperous shining cities on hills and dystopian hellscapes in popular culture. A deadly plague that never leaves and the onerous precautions it requires are often features of dystopian fiction. Masks are a powerful signifier that something has gone horribly, perhaps irretrievably wrong. They tell us that we canât breathe the air around us safely, and people donât want to be reminded of that. Masks put us in the wrong setting for the story we want to tell ourselves. Masks remind us that there might not be a happy ending.Â
Part of so-called âmask fatigueâ was this constant reminder of the existence of the pandemic. This twisted logic of avoidance became a factor in public health decision-making. In March of 2022, Rochelle Walensky, President Bidenâs director of the Centers for Disease Control said, â I just know that people are tired. The scarlet letter of the pandemic is the mask.â Really think about what it means that the highest public health official in the United States likened an effective public health measure to puritanical shaming for the sin of adultery. Wearing a mask became seen as a punishment, instead of participating in collective mitigation of life-threatening risks.
In hindsight, itâs no wonder that the lie of âthereâs no wolf out there anymoreâ went over like gangbusters with exhausted people, who were being worn ragged by the weight of trying to endure a once-in-a-century public health disaster with little to no material support and rapidly disappearing guidance from their governments. I donât blame anyone who ignored the niggle of suspicion in the back of their mind warning them that maybe they should continue masking just to be on the safe side. Nor do I fault people who just gave up and couldnât find the will to try to protect themselves and others any more, as the world was moving backwards to normal. They were abandoned, and that enrages me. Yes, there was a cohort of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers who were gumming up the works, but there was a critical mass of people who were willing to do the right thing. They needed ethical leadership, though. Not everyone follows the right people on Twitter, who have been shouting themselves hoarse about the risks and the disastrous consequences of ignoring them. Not everyone can parse through the torrent of conflicting information and land on the right choice of who to trust. Most of these people have never heard of Long Covid, because they werenât told.Â
Covid-19 can be asymptomatic or deadly in its acute phase. Dodging a bad outcome during their first introduction to the pathogen left some people certain they had nothing to worry about from it. As early as 2020, though, there were reports of so-called âlong haulers,â who developed serious health problems that wouldnât go away: brain fog, deep fatigue, intolerance to exercise, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and other worrying symptoms. Some of these patients had what seemed like âmildâ infections â flu-like symptoms that were unpleasant but manageable. An early hint that these infections might be more serious than they appeared was anosmia â the loss of taste and smell â being among the symptoms some people reported. It became something of a punchline on social media, but think about what it means to lose two out of the five senses. This is a serious neurological event that threw up the first red flag that Covid-19 infection affected the brain. As weâve gotten further into the pandemic, it became clear that some patients werenât getting better. They had abnormal immune responses to the infection and developed lingering symptoms like brain fog, deep fatigue, serious shortness of breath and heart palpitations that lasted months or years. At this and every turn, the potential serious long-term effects were downplayed. Perhaps that made sense, at first. 2020 saw waves of death from acute Covid-19 crash over and overwhelm health care systems that seemed as if they might topple. Getting that under control was imperative. However, survival and death were not the only outcomes from Covid-19, and the vast middle ground has become a kind of no-manâs land in public health. That middle ground is being filled with people suffering from Long Covid, and the risk of joining this group increases with every infection.
That moment in early 2022 when mask mandates and other mitigation strategies began toppling like dominos is sometimes called The Great Unmasking. When all those face masks went into the trash, so did the facade of community beyond interacting with The Markets. âGetting back to normalâ really meant âgetting back to spendingâ â and not just online. Have fun! Frequent your favorite restaurants and bars. Scream your lungs out singing at concerts. Head back to your old haunts and find new ones, but spend, free of the worry of the cost of infection. As you laugh, open-mouthed, with your friends and family, inhale their exhales and spend. The Great Unmasking was a revelation of the absolute supremacy of capitalist illogic in most of the world. That moment was a sharp delineation in the continuing battle over the values and ethics of a functional society. The disappointing result was that preventing the spread of a brain-damaging and heart-attack-causing virus wasnât as important as shareholder returns and profit margins.
When I think of The Great Unmasking, the phrase âthe banality of evilâ springs to mind. I donât use that reference lightly. There was something fascist at work in the deluded chest beating about those with robust health and immunity (the strong) prevailing over illness to carry on the work of capitalism, while advocating for the elderly and disabled (the weak) to be thrown to the wolves to suffer and die. In this framework is the explicit acceptance and sometimes even the vaunting of a culling. When the masks came off, we were in the stunning position of watching the shepherds (and some of the sheep!) welcome the wolf into the herd in a bizarre, macho dominance display. They wanted us all to race gladly into a standoff with a rapidly mutating, highly communicable, deadly virus that damages peopleâs brains. The long-time anti-maskers cheered and mocked those who continued to mask. They still say, âI had it, and I was fine! Stop cowering in fear!â The only proper response is another question: âAre you absolutely sure youâre fine?â accompanied by a recommendation to google âLong Covid.â
The Great Unmasking abandoned the average person to bear the long-term destructive risks of this virus alone. Itâs impossible for individuals assessing their own risk tolerance to get us to the other side of this. The Great Unmasking revealed just how much we need each other.