Day after day, President Biden, 78 — who has been fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus — is seen outdoors wearing a mask.
His top health adviser on the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, also urges Americans to wear masks outdoors — and maybe even two masks, just to be safe.
But one liberal website is finally taking aim at outdoor mask-wearing.
In a piece headlined “It’s About Time for Us to Stop Wearing Masks Outside,” Slate makes a case for why the practice could well be pointless.
“For a while now, this has felt a little unnecessary, if understandable, given that we were still learning things about the virus and were trying to be as careful as possible,” wrote senior editor Shannon Palus. “But now, as we’ve come to know more about the virus, as vaccinations are ramping up, and as we’re trying to figure out how to live with some level of COVID in a sustainable way, masking up outside when you’re at most briefly crossing paths with people is starting to feel barely understandable.”
“Look: I believe masks (and even shaming) are indispensable in controlling the spread of the coronavirus. Despite early waffling, public health experts are virtually unanimously in support of them and have remained so even as our early dedication to scrubbing surfaces and Cloroxing veggies wound down,” she wrote.
Palus says the possibility of catching COVID simply passing by someone on the sidewalk in remote, citing experts.
Palus brings the statistics:
“Zain Chagla, an infectious diseases physician with McMaster University, recently wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Star noting that last summer’s outdoor gatherings coincided with an all-time low of cases in the city. While it’s important to mask in outdoor crowds or if you’re hanging out close to someone in a park, Chagla explains, the main message should be that the outdoors is a safe place to be,” she wrote.
“He gave me a rough sense of how unlikely outdoor transmission is in the scenario where you’re walking unmasked on the sidewalk and briefly pass someone. First, you or the person you’re passing would have to happen to have an asymptomatic infection, he explained, and then everyone would have to be exhaling and inhaling at just the right moment, and also, exchanging enough particles to actually seed another infection: “You’re talking about a probability of getting hit by a car, and being struck by lightning.”
Palus cited other studies.
“A paper published in Indoor Air looked at 1,245 cases in China and found just one instance of outdoor transmission, which involved people having a conversation, which means they had to be close to one another for some period of time and face to face. According to data from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, shared earlier this month with the Irish Times, of 232,164 cases in Ireland, just 262 were associated with “locations which are primarily associated with outdoor activities.” That is, about 0.1 percent,” she wrote.