Humbled by a Mask

At the very moment when mankind is advanced enough to grapple with Artificial Intelligence, gene editing and quantum computing, we’re totally defenseless against a virus – except for a cloth over our face.

h, the sheer irony of masks.

After months of declaring that face coverings were unnecessary, mocking Joe Biden as “politically correct” for wearing one, then saying that he himself looked like the Lone Ranger in a mask but still not appearing in public suitably covered, Donald Trump was finally photographed with a POTUS-branded mask last week.

His U-turn has clearly given cover to other prominent mask-skeptics like Boris Johnson to perform a similar maneuver, in his case more a zig-zag because of its conditional nature. The Scots, for their part, have become recent mask-enthusiasts, possibly to make a tartan-statement about Sassenach carelessness.

Politicians’ late conversion to the glasses-fogging, heat-rash inducing face coverings comes as the World Health Organization reversed its own position last month to support masks. Perhaps the only wonder is that it took them so long: common sense (which informed Israeli policy) has dictated from the beginning that an airborne virus would spread far less if people prevented it getting airborne in the first place.

Six months in to the battle against COVID-19, the official embrace of masks raises an intriguing possibility.