One of the earliest photos of me features my grandfather, a doctor from the Philippines, cradling me as a newborn while wearing a face mask. He had a cold at the time and I was as vulnerable as a human being can be. That photo didn’t normalize the idea of wearing face masks for me, though I did feel comparatively inured to the sight as I grew up. Relatives would show up to gatherings wearing them and, in a family of medical professionals, all manner of PPE was unremarkable. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a cultural element to this as well. Up there with that common, meme-ified image of an elderly Asian man out for a leisurely, inquisitive stroll with his hands clasped behind his back is the image of an elderly Asian person out in public with a face mask on. Sometimes, the images are one and the same. I had always assumed the habit of wearing a mask when you or someone else was ill was benign, certainly not a behavior enacted by everyone, but nothing all that interesting. COVID-19 challenged then irrevocably altered that assumption.
I haven’t stopped masking in public since mid-2021, at a time when the public was assured, through a combination of widespread vaccination and boosters, personal health safety measures, and (looking back now) myopic wishful thinking, that the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic was over. It is true that, of the many prevention measures suggested or required by the government during the first years of COVID, masking was the most visible and symbolically load-bearing. At first, a marker of compliance or, glimpsing the half-worn, porous cloth mask slumping below a stranger’s nose, a lack thereof; and later, a potent indicator of political allegiance, the way to tell if someone was a Fauci stooge or a health-conscious Good Samaritan. Sometimes, those who still mask glibly proclaim that they haven’t gotten sick in years. I haven’t been so consistent or so lucky, though my reasons for continuing to wear N95s in public are not necessarily premised on the personal benefits they render onto me.
Five years have passed since the onset of the pandemic. No one wants to think about COVID anymore. This desire is understandable even if it’s partially manufactured. COVID cases surged last summer, which scientists attributed to increased crowding in air-conditioned spaces, travel, and the flagging immunity of those who got boosted the year before. Even though the CDC declared the end of the federal COVID health emergency in May of 2023, the virus never went away, never remained static in one strain, and never stopped killing large groups of people. Any vestige or variant of the disease is metabolized as part of a new and less dangerous era. It’s inarguable that, thanks largely to vaccines, COVID-19 poses a smaller problem now than it did in 2020 and 2021, but it remains a problem nonetheless.
Everyone remembers lockdown differently. Understandably, very few want to revisit the possibility of such drastic measures again. As David Wallace-Wells observes in his recent New York Times piece on the five-year anniversary of the pandemic, the lasting consequences of COVID, globally and locally, acknowledged and suppressed, have turned people into “hyperindividualists.” As a consequence, Wallace-Wells writes, “A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death.” Speaking on the Know Your Enemy podcast, Wallace-Wells and his interlocutors noted that a feeling has pervaded: the reluctance, even outright animosity, towards the idea of ever doing anything so anguished or selfless for others again, especially when those others are people ideologically and politically opposed to your own well-being.
What is so ironic about this feeling now is how directly it reflects the unprecedented global solidarity that the first year of COVID necessitated. A massive, collective effort, taken on out of fear as well as duty, to mitigate the spread of disease and death also required prolonged isolation. It required individual efforts—masking, social distancing, more efficient indoor ventilation, more rigorous health monitoring like regular body temperature checks and testing—that were enacted for the benefit of others. Since 2021, there’s been a concerted effort to move past the more difficult aspects of lockdown and the pandemic. Understandable given the public’s need for a sense of normalcy, but detrimental for how it downplayed the severity of COVID. For good reason, the hosts of the podcast Death Panel have termed the rapid reversal of pandemic-era health protocols the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic.”
Appearances matter in this regard. The experience of lockdown and the severity of COVID was distributed unevenly, particularly for younger generations who survived with little to no interaction with the illness or those affected. Now, COVID is mentioned in tandem with the flu as a relatively benign, regular seasonal illness, even though new mutations of the flu are becoming more difficult to combat and, in some cases, more deadly than COVID. Because it is no longer mandatory to follow the public health guidelines that steered us less than gracefully through the pandemic, doing so anyway is now a matter of choice and personal autonomy rather than a collective effort. Those most vulnerable are largely left to navigate a public landscape rife with little to no concern for their well-being.
For my part, I mask at work, at the movies, the grocery store, at church, in a rideshare, on the plane, on the subway, and most any public space where I’m not eating. I mask when I feel a bit peaky. I’ll leave the mask off in a restaurant or if I’m at a social gathering with friends I know to be healthy. I try to think of the mask as an object of utility, divorced from its political symbolism. The pandemic crystallized the fact that infectious diseases are a part of everyday life, as inescapable as changes in the weather. I wear a jacket when it’s cold; I wear a mask when I’m in a crowd.
Asked often if there’s any scenario in which I would stop masking completely, I respond with a noncommittal maybe. Working in retail and customer service means interacting with people who are careless, oblivious, or outright confrontational. Sneezing on tables and merchandise, coughing in the open air, wiping hands wet with mucus on pants and then opening doors—even with a population vaccinated above 80 percent against the most common and contagious viruses, common sloppiness is difficult to protect against. I’m lucky to be healthy and diligent, but, speaking pragmatically, I’m also uninsured and in no position to take many days off from work if I’m sick. Masking is as much a precaution for me as for others.
As federal mandates slackened then disappeared completely, the confusion and irritation towards people who still masked in public increased, derision used as a compensatory relief valve for the collective hope that everything would go back to normal. I don’t mask as a symbolic gesture, though often this interpretation is made for me. Invariably, upon seeing me wearing a mask, a customer will ask if I’m sick, or point out that doing so means I’m just breathing in my own CO2, or that masking is a psy-op. I don’t take these interactions as threatening, only mildly annoying. They’re revealing for how quickly they can send naysayers into an emotional tailspin, for how little is needed to expose the fragility of their grip on the world as safe and stable.
What confronts us now is the lingering, undaunted fact that COVID is still with us and that its novelty, its unprecedented resilience and infectiousness, its attendant effects on the economy and the political climate, was the primary clarion call that made voluntary prevention possible. Apathy and exhaustion have resulted in a palpable resistance to the solidaristic actions taken during lockdown. It would be a mistake to assume that everyone who got vaccinated or wore a mask did so out of fellow feeling. Even more so to think that masking’s politicization as a symbol of violated bodily autonomy or saintly altruism is divorced from the string of protests that have occurred since 2020, where masking, both to conceal identity and to mitigate virality amongst crowds, has been leveraged into a crackdown on so-called criminals and “terrorist sympathizers.”
Had masking become normalized as merely another means of preventative maintenance, COVID and whatever future disease that awaits us would still be a pressing, ever-changing issue demanding the world’s attention. The hard work of creating new vaccines, studying new variants, and sharing research with other countries, an increasingly fantastical prospect, would still need to continue. No magic bullet exists and it was foolish to believe it ever did. This isn’t cause for despair or cynicism. That brief glimpse of civic cooperation at the height of that first pandemic year showed that a largely impersonal but no less compelling solidarity was possible. The circumstances under which that solidarity was levied weren’t comfortable or sustainable and they arguably produced a meaner, solipsistic world.
And yet it’s difficult not to emphasize that something as simple as masking can continue to make a world of difference. If nothing else, and there are many lessons still to be learned from the pandemic, COVID made clear that our tolerance for the demands that other people’s vulnerabilities place on us are unforgivably low, and that our sense of what constitutes freedom and mobility, those buzzy virtues that tell us we are in control and at the mercy of no one else but ourselves, are warped beyond reality.
Masking is a reminder that I share a bustling, contradictory world with other people who deserve some assurance that their health, and my own, isn’t taken for granted. So maybe it is a symbol after all. A lasting existential consequence of pandemic fatigue is capitulation to the sentiment that there are some people who deserve to get sick, who deserve to die. At every turn, we must reject this idea as insidious, pernicious, and unforgivable. There are graceful gestures we can offer one another, no matter if we deserve them. Masking will remain a lifelong baseline priority for me for this lofty reason, among more practical considerations. Make no mistake, it would be more convenient if I never had to again. I don’t cling to my boxes of N95s and often dread wearing them for long periods of time. But, in the grand scheme, it’s a small thing, and worth doing.
