Most Support Mask Requirement On Transportation

The chart above is from a new AP / NORC Poll -- done between April 14th and 18th of a nationwide sample of 1,085 adults, with a 3.9 point margin of error.

A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that masks cannot be required on airplanes (and other transportation). But that goes against the wishes of a majority of Americans. About 56% favor requiring masks on airplanes, trains, and public transit.

Large pluralities also favor masks for workers who work with the public (49% to 27%) and people attending crowded public events (49% to 28%).

Democrats Are The Best Party For Economic Growth

For decades, the Republicans have posed as the best party for economic growth. They still think that taking restraints and taxes off the rich and the corporations will benefit everyone. But that has never been true -- it just fattens the bank accounts of the rich and corporations, and nothing "trickles-down" to anyone else.

The truth is that the economy has always fared better under Democrats. And with the Republicans adding anti-mask and anti-vaccination policies to their failed economic policies, Democrats are not the only party that will grow the economy, helping both businesses and workers.

Here is how Catherine Rampell describes this reality in The Washington Post:

Thanks to President Biden’s vaccine mandate for employers — and the GOP’s response — Democrats have taken over the mantle of the pro-business, pro-economy, pro-growth party.

It is Democrats, after all, who have a plan to get the economy humming again, by controlling the coronavirus and thereby making it safe for Americans to work, shop, attend school and otherwise resume their pre-pandemic economic lives.

For the past decade, voters have usually said they trusted Republicans more than Democrats on the economy. This was a triumph of propaganda over experience, given how much better the economy has generally performed under Democratic presidents, on nearly every major metric — jobs, output growth, productivity, stock prices. To be fair, Democrats’ superior economic record to date has been primarily due to luck. But right now, Democrats deserve Americans’ economic faith because they are the only — yes, only — party actively working to help the economy recover from covid-19.

For a year and a half now, the virus has been in charge of the economy. Getting employment and other key metrics back on track requires curbing the virus’s spread. Under Biden’s leadership, Democrats have pleaded with Americans to voluntarily undertake the cheapest, most effective measure available for accomplishing this: getting vaccinated. Democrats have also urged adoption of other relatively inexpensive interventions, such as wearing masks in high-risk settings. These measures would relieve pressure on hospitals, help schools remain open (allowing parents to work), and generally make it safer and more attractive to engage in normal economic activities.

Republican politicians, however, have mostly opposed these common-sense policies.

Some have actively discouraged people from getting vaccinated, amplifiedconspiracy theories, and (in places including Florida and Texas) obstructed private companies from taking measures to reduce the spread of covid-19 within their own workplaces. These efforts, coupled with the spread of the more transmissible delta variant, have led to increasedhospitalizations and deaths and slower job growth. . . .

Last week, Biden announced more aggressive actions to control the spread, including greater availability of covid-19 tests and vaccination mandates for federal workers. The most controversial measure affected the private sector: a forthcoming requirement for companies with at least 100 employees to ensure their workers are either vaccinated or tested weekly if they return to the workplace.

Republican politicians around the country have adopted a pro-covid-19, anti-economy response. . . .

Why might companies welcome a government order that ties their hands? Because they know they’re better off if their workers, and the public more broadly, are vaccinated.

Higher vaccination rates reduce the risk of interruptions to operations and make customers feel safer. Imposing mandates unilaterally is perilous, though, because Republicans have turned it into a culture-war issue. Given labor shortages and the highly combustible political environment, employers (understandably) fear losing anti-vax workers to competitors.

Public support for employer vaccination mandates has generally been rising, perhaps changing the risk calculus for some firms — but not enough of them, and not fast enough. That’s why it’s helpful for the government to step in and play bad cop. . . .

Increasing vaccination is the best, cheapest way to save lives and stimulate the economy. If Republicans won’t get on board with this pro-growth policy, the least they can do is get out of the way.

Public Supports Mask And Vaccine Mandates In Schools

 

The charts above are from the new AP / NORC Poll -- done between August 12th and 16th of a national sample of 1,729 adults, with a 3.2 point margin of error.

It shows that a majority of adults support the mandating of vaccinations and the wearing of masks in our schools. 

Republicans oppose both. They still believe the lies about COVID-19 and the vaccines that they have been told by their leaders.

Support For Regulating Personal Behavior For Common Good

The chart above is from a USA Today / Ipsos Poll -- done on August 17th and 18th of a national sample of 1,088 adults, with a 3.4 point margin of error. 

It shows widespread support for measures that regulate personal behavior for the common good. They don't believe these measures impinge on the freedoms that people in this country enjoy.

Republicans want people to think that doesn't apply to state and local governments mandating the wearing of masks, or companies requiring their employees to be vaccinated. The public disagrees. About 66% support the mask mandates, and about 62% support the vaccination requirement. Those are significant majorities.

Abbott's Positive For COVID (Still Refuses To Protect Texans)

The office of Governor Abbott of Texas has verified that he tested positive for COVID-19. This in spite of the fact that he not only was vaccinated, but has gotten a third vaccine booster shot. This should make him realize just how dangerous the new Delta variant of the virus really is, but it hasn't.

He still opposes both vaccine and mask mandates in the state -- even in our schools to protect children. He knows how dangerous the virus is, but thinks his political stance is more important than protecting the citizens of the state he is supposed to be leading.

He's receiving monoclonal antibody infusions to protect himself from getting even sicker and possibly requiring hospitalization. This same treatment is not available to the millions of Texans with no health insurance. And he continues to oppose expanding Medicaid to give those Texans the insurance they need.

Abbott shows that he doesn't care about the health or lives of Texans. He's only interested in playing to his right-wing extremist base. 

You Not Being Vaccinated IS Our Business!

Those on the right would like for us to believe that being vaccinated or wearing a mask is a personal choice, and by refusing to do either they are just exercising their person freedom. They even go so far as to say it is none of our business whether they are vaccinated or wear a mask in a crowd. They are wrong!

A person choosing to not wear a mask or not be vaccinated is putting other people in danger and making the pandemic last longer than it should. And that is our business. You don't have the right to endanger the public health anymore than you have a right to drive drunk or yell "fire" in a crowded theater. Rights have some limits, especially when it comes to endangering others.

Here is some of what Jamelle Bouie had to say about it in The New York Times:

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s damn business whether I’m vaccinated or not,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, told CNN last month. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, wrote similarly (albeit less abrasively) in May that vaccination was a “personal and private decision” and that “no one should be shamed, coerced or mandated to take Covid-19 vaccines that are being allowed under an emergency use authorization.”

Johnson and all the others are wrong. Wearing a helmet while bike riding, strapping on your seatbelt in a car — these are personal decisions, at least as far as your own injuries are concerned. Vaccination is different. In the context of a deadly and often debilitating contagion, in which the unchecked spread of infection has consequences for the entire society, vaccination is not a personal decision. And inasmuch as the United States has struggled to achieve herd immunity against Covid-19 through vaccination, it is because we refuse to treat the pandemic for what it is: a social problem to solve through collective action.

From the jump, the federal government devolved its response to the pandemic, foisting responsibility onto states and localities, which, in turn, left individual Americans and their communities to navigate conflicting rules and information.

This approach continued with the arrival of vaccines. Until recently, in the face of a vaccination plateau, there was not even a mandate for federal employees to be vaccinated. States and employers have been left to their own devices, and individuals face a patchwork of rules and mandates, depending on where they live and where they work.

Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people to prevent the spread of a deadly disease — as a personal one? Or that many people have refused to get a shot, citing the privacy of their decision as well as their freedom to do as they choose?

Consider, too, the larger cultural and political context of the United States. We still live in the shadow of the Reagan revolution and its successful attack on America’s traditions of republican solidarity and social responsibility. “Over the past 50 years,” Mike Konczal writes in “Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself From the Grip of the Invisible Hand,” “both our personal lives and our economy have been forced ever more deeply into market dependency.”

This extends into our political lives — and our political selves — as well. If American society has been reshaped in the image of capital, then Americans themselves have been pushed to relate to one another and our institutions as market creatures in search of utility, as opposed to citizens bound together by rights and obligations. . . .

Not because they are lazy, of course, but because this is the society we have built, where individuals are left to carry the burdens of life into the market and hope that they survive. This so-called freedom is ill suited to human flourishing. It is practically maladaptive in the face of a pandemic.

That’s why families and communities were left to fend for themselves in the face of disease, why so many people treat the question of exposure and contagion as a personal choice made privately and why our institutions have made vaccination a choice when it should have been mandated from the start. . . .

When you structure a society so that every person must be an island, you cannot then blame people when inevitably they act as if they are. If we want a country that takes solidarity seriously, we will actually have to build one.

Parents Favor Mask But Not Vaccine Mandates For Schools

The charts above are from the Kaiser Family Foundation Poll -- done between July 15th and August 2nd of a national sample of 1,259 parents with a child under 18 living in the home. The poll had a 4 point margin of error.

52% Support Face Masks & Social Distancing Mandates

The chart above reflects the result of a new Monmouth University Poll -- done between July 21st and 26th of a national sample of 804 adults, with a 3.5 point margin of error. With the resurgence of COVID-19, a small majority of Americans would support rules reinstitution the wearing of masks and social distancing.

Americans Don't Trust Most People On Being Vaccinated

 

I am going to continue to wear my mask in stores and other places where the general public goes. Why? because I simply don't trust people I don't know to be honest about whether they have been vaccinated or not. And that would be true even in a large crowd if everyone had to show their vaccination cards (because there has already been instances of fake vaccination cards being sold).

You might say that doesn't show much faith in my fellow citizens. You would be right. But why should I trust everyone when some of them wouldn't even wear a mask (which is much easier to do than get vaccinated). 

I'm not alone. Note the results of the chart above. It shows the results of a new Axios / Ipsos Poll -- done between May 21st and 24th of a national sample of 1,102 adults, with a 3.2 point margin of error.

Most people (88%) trust their family and close friends. And a significant number (71%) also trust their coworkers. But it falls way off after those two groups. Far less than a majority trust anyone else, especially people they don't know.

It's one thing to believe you don't need a mask around people who have been fully vaccinated. It quite another thing to trust others to be truthful about being vaccinated.

A Mask Requirement Has Nothing To Do With "Freedom"

There are some on the right who refuse to wear a mask to help stop the coronavirus. They say it's their right to refuse to wear a mask, because a mask requirement impinges on their freedom.

They are wrong. Refusing to wear a mask doesn't mean you are free. It means you are disregarding the rights of your fellow citizens -- the right to be safe and secure.

Michael Tomasky has written an excellent op-ed for The New York Times on this subject. Here is a small part of what he wrote:

One of the key authors of the Western concept of freedom is John Stuart Mill. In “On Liberty,” he wrote that liberty (or freedom) means “doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, as long as what we do does not harm them even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong.”

Note the clause “as long as what we do does not harm them.” He tossed that in there almost as a given — indeed, it is a given. This is a standard definition of freedom, more colloquially expressed in the adage “Your freedom to do as you please with your fist ends where my jaw begins.”

Now, conservatives revere Mill. But today, in the age of the pandemic, Mill and other conservative heroes like John Locke would be aghast at the way the American right wing bandies about the word “freedom.”

Freedom emphatically does not include the freedom to get someone else sick. It does not include the freedom to refuse to wear a mask in the grocery store, sneeze on someone in the produce section and give him the virus. That’s not freedom for the person who is sneezed upon. For that person, the first person’s “freedom” means chains — potential illness and even perhaps a death sentence. No society can function on that definition of freedom.

Joe Biden does a pretty good job of talking about this. At a recent town hall in Miami, he said: “I view wearing this mask not so much protecting me, but as a patriotic responsibility. All the tough guys say, ‘Oh, I’m not wearing a mask, I’m not afraid.’ Well, be afraid for your husband, your wife, your son, your daughter, your neighbor, your co-worker. That’s who you’re protecting having this mask on, and it should be viewed as a patriotic duty, to protect those around you.”. . .

Freedom means the freedom not to get infected by the idiot who refuses to mask up. Even John Stuart Mill would have agreed.

Refusing To Wear A Mask Is NOT A Right - Just A Statement

 

The image to the right was found on Facebook. It makes just as much sense as refusing to wear a mask in the midst of a pandemic.

Some say refusing to wear a mask is a cultural thing. That makes no sense. Wearing or not wearing a mask has nothing to do with our culture.

Others say it is their right to refuse to wear a mask. That's also ridiculous. No one has a right to endanger others -- and that is exactly what refusing to wear a mask does.

The truth is that refusing to wear a mask is nothing more than a political statement (and a dangerous one at that) -- it's to show the world your loyalty to Trump.

Here's how Paul Krugman describes the mask refusal in his New York Times column:

So how can anti-masker agitation still be a major factor impeding America’s ability to cope with this pandemic?

You sometimes see people suggesting that wearing face masks is somehow inconsistent with America’s individualistic culture. And if that were true it would be a condemnation of that culture. After all, there’s something very wrong with any definition of freedom that includes the right to gratuitously expose other people to the risk of disease and death — which is what refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic amounts to.

But I don’t believe that this is a deep-seated cultural phenomenon. Some might dismiss the widespread compliance I see all around me by saying that New York doesn’t represent Real America™. But even leaving aside the fact that 21st-century America is mainly urban — almost half of Americans live in metropolitan areas with more than one million people — would they say the same about Arizona?

And bear in mind that as long as I can remember, many shops and restaurants have had signs on their doors proclaiming “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” How many of these establishments have been stormed by mobs of bare-chested protesters?

In short, anti-mask agitation isn’t really about freedom, or individualism, or culture. It’s a declaration of political allegiance, driven by Trump and his allies.

But why make a partisan issue out of what should be straightforward public health policy? The fairly obvious answer is that we’re looking at the efforts of an amoral politician to rescue his flailing campaign.

The economy’s partial snapback from its plunge early this year hasn’t given Trump the political dividends he hoped for. His attempts to stir up panic with claims that radical activists are going to destroy the suburbs haven’t gained traction, with voters generally seeing Joe Biden as the better candidate to maintain law and order.

And it’s probably too late to change the views of the majority of voters believing that he has given up on fighting the coronavirus.

So his latest ploy is an attempt to convince people that the Covid-19 threat is over. But widespread mask-wearing is a constant reminder that the virus is still out there. Hence Trump’s renewed push against the simplest, most sensible of public health precautions.

As a political strategy, this ploy probably won’t work. But it will lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths.

Which Masks Are Most Effective Against The Coronavirus?

Reasonable people know we are in the midst of a serious pandemic -- a pandemic with a virus that has no cure and, as yet, cannot be protected by vaccination. The only tool we have right now against the virus (other than social distancing) is the wearing of a mask.

But wouldn't you like to know how effective the mask of your choice really is? Which mask is the most effective in stopping transmission of the virus?

Researchers at Duke University decided to find out. They tested 14 different kinds of masks, and you can go here to see how they conducted those tests.

Here are the results of the tests they conducted:

The study found that the most effective mask when it comes to reducing the transmission of respiratory droplets was the professionally fitted, non-valved N95. Three-layer surgical masks and cotton masks were quite effective as well. Surprisingly, a few masks were found to be quite ineffective, specifically folded bandanas and knitted masks. Valved N95 masks also “decrease protection of persons surrounding the wearer” because of “the exhalation valve, which opens for strong outwards airflow.”

Neck fleeces, also known as gaiter masks, were the least effective of all and were actually found to produce more respiratory droplets compared to not wearing a mask because they appeared to “disperse the largest droplets into a multitude of smaller droplets.” The study indicates that because they create more particles and smaller particles that are airborne longer than larger ones, these masks may actually be counterproductive. Fischer told CNN, “We were extremely surprised to find that the number of particles measured with the fleece actually exceeded the number of particles measured without wearing any mask. We want to emphasize that we really encourage people to wear masks, but we want them to wear masks that actually work.”

Texas Governor Issues Order Requiring Masks

On May 1st, Texas Governor Greg Abbott decided to follow the Republican line and reopen the state of Texas. He eliminated requirements in place for social distancing and the wearing of face masks, and by the middle of May he had opened all businesses to serve the public at 50% capacity.

Things went OK for a while. But the COVID-19 virus takes a while to incubate, and near the end of June the number of new cases started to get out of hand (see chart above from The COVID Tracking Project).

In July, the governor finally realized he had made a serious mistake. On July 2nd, he issued an executive order requiring the wearing of face masks in most Texas counties (those with at least 20 cases of COVID-19). He did exempt some things to pander to his right-wing base -- the wearing of face masks is NOT required at voting precincts or in churches.

Here is the operative part of the executive order:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas, by virtue of the power and authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the State of Texas, do hereby order the following on a statewide basis effective at 12:0 1 p.m. on July 3, 2020:

Every person in Texas shall wear a face covering over the nose and mouth when inside a commercial entity or other building or space open to the public, or when in an outdoor public space, wherever it is not feasible to maintain six feet of social distancing from another person not in the same household; provided, however, that this face-covering requirement does not apply to the following:

1. any person younger than 10 years of age;
   
   
2. any person with a medical condition or disability that prevents wearing a face covering;
   
   
3. any person while the person is consuming food or drink, or is seated at a restaurant to eat or drink;
   
   
4. any person while the person is (a) exercising outdoors or engaging in physical activity outdoors, and (b) maintaining a safe distance from other people not in the same household;
   
   
5. any person while the person is driving alone or with passengers who are part of the same household as the driver;
   
   
6. any person obtaining a service that requires temporary removal of the face covering for security surveillance, screening, or a need for specific access to the face, such as while visiting a bank or while obtaining a personal- care service involving the face, but only to the extent necessary for the temporary removal;
   
   
7. any person while the person is in a swimming pool, lake, or similar body of water;
   
   
8. any person who is voting, assisting a voter, serving as a poli watcher, or actively administering an election, but wearing a face covering is strongly encouraged;
   
   
9. any person who is actively providing or obtaining access to religious worship, but wearing a face covering is strongly encouraged;
   
   10. any person while the person is giving a speech for a broadcast or to an audience; or
   
   11. any person in a county (a) that meets the requisite criteria promulgated

Public Overwhelmingly Supports Requiring Face Masks

The charts above reflect the results of a recent Washington Post / Ipsos Poll -- done between April 27th and May 4th of a national sample of 8,086 adults, with a 1 point margin of error.

It shows a huge percentage of the population supports the requiring of face masks at open businesses. About 81% supports requiring workers to wear face masks, and about 76% supports requiring customers to wear face masks.