If you think about it, “the face mask is the condom of our generation,” says Brian Castrucci, the president of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public-health nonprofit. Castrucci spent a decade working in state and local health departments, and he remembers when the HIV epidemic made condoms mainstream in the United States. No one was especially thrilled about it, but as the dangers of unprotected sex became clear, people came to accept them.
The same can now be said of face masks, which have gone from seeming like a silly overreaction to a ubiquitous pandemic necessity. Parents are pulling them onto their toddlers. Waiters are wearing them. Pool-goers might don them. There’s even a disturbing-looking contraption that lets you eat with one on.
We’ll probably keep having to wear masks in public for the foreseeable future. Ben Cowling, the head of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, told me he recommends wearing masks on public transit or in crowded areas even after it’s safe to leave our homes again. Trish Greenhalgh, a primary-care professor at the University of Oxford, told me people should wear masks in public until “there are no new cases, or very few cases,” a goal that the U.S. is still very far from reaching.
But while masks are good for public health, they also make our interactions more difficult by concealing the lower part of our face. The constant social ambiguity might get harder to take once states start opening up more fully, and we re ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
