A fair and balanced take

I wrote here some weeks ago that I didn't think mask mandates were still necessary or generally productive. Mike Nichols in The Atlantic agrees and he raises the difficult questions we face every day and seldom think about regarding what risks to accept. What worries me is that these problems are complicated and the people who are trying to make them simple have caused a lot of problems.

Before we had effective vaccines and a high level of population immunity, masks and distancing were the only means we had to mitigate the pandemic. And yes, they worked where they were consistently applied. This is convincingly demonstrated by comparisons both international and within the United States. And an uncontrolled Covid-19 epidemic was not something we could just accept as should be obvious from the overloaded hospitals and more than a million deaths. However, as of now, the Omicron variant is so transmissible that cloth masks actually don't do a whole lot to block it, but population immunity is high enough that the surge in infections has not been matched by a surge in hospitalizations. Requiring masks and restricting businesses have costs and the tradeoff now makes it just not worth it any more, in my opinion.

But people just have a hard time getting adjusting to complexity, and change in any direction. Saying that mask mandates aren't indicated today is going to make some people claim that means they were never necessary and no, that doesn't follow and it isn't true. As for people who are vulnerable because they have weakened immune systems or can't be vaccinated, they're vulnerable to all sorts of infections and I don't mean to sound callous, but it's impossible to turn the whole world into a sanitary bubble. People who want to continue masking should certainly do so and nobody should have any problem with it. And if you are going to a gathering where there will  be vulnerable people, and they want people to be masked, you should graciously go along. If a new more virulent variant comes along, or another pathogen altogether, and masking is again indicated, you should just do it. 

But for now, no I don't think it's generally necessary.