I don’t like wearing a mask.
It makes my face hot and gets snagged on my whiskers. It tickles my nose. My glasses get fogged up when I wear them. I can’t see the facial expressions of others who are wearing masks. I really enjoyed my surgery rotation in medical school except for having to wear a mask for hours at a time in the operating room.
But here’s the thing – it is one of the few effective measures we currently have to help keep from spreading a potentially deadly virus to each other. Masks aren’t perfect, but the mounting evidence shows that they decrease the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
We have all been wearing masks all day in our office for months now. I wear one whenever I am indoors in a public building, except occasionally when I am in a room by myself. I don’t wear it when I am outside unless I am in a crowd of some sort or visiting outside with particularly high risk people. So if I am working outside, or running or hiking or fishing, I don’t have one on but I stay away from other people.
Since we know that it is possible to have the novel coronavirus and not know it, wearing a mask not only protects me but those around me. In fact, the evidence suggests it protects others even more than it protects me. The person I walk by in the grocery store could have a medical problem that I can’t know about by just looking at them. Wearing a mask is an act of compassion. It is a tangible way to love your neighbor as yourself.
For 99% of us, wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience. If
masks work, I can potentially help save lives by wearing one. An itchy nose
seems like a small price to pay. If it turns out we were wrong and masks didn’t
really help, is it really so bad to have inconvenienced myself a little bit in
an effort to protect my fellow human beings?
