A candid admission at the outset.
Math was not my favorite subject growing up in Virginia. Neither was logic, the rudiments of which I later learned from a tutor, “Mr. Brown,” in a cramped apartment in a Boston housing project.
But here we are, decades later, engulfed in the grips of a terrible pandemic, and I’m able to apply the two — math and logic -in a way that makes sense to me, millions of others, and hopefully to those still in doubt about the efficacy of mask wearing and vaccines. Here’s the deal.
As of this writing, over 650,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID, a huge number of them unvaccinated. On top of that, the average U.S. daily death toll from COVID-19 has recently passed 2000.
Against those awful facts is that scientific evidence that mask- wearing and vaccinations can sharply reduce pandemic-related deaths.
The data is the data. The math is the math.
So, if we follow the fact that masks and vaccinations prevent infection …well…duh…it doesn’t take rocket science to apply the logic, does it?
Back now to a recent walk.
Out of habit, I normally start my mile walk around a local mall with a quick hand check confirming the presence of my keys, wallet and phone, in that order. But with the spread of COVID-19, my check these days includes …. my mask! (Shucks, I’ve even conditioned myself to feel naked and experience pangs of guilt “if my mask ain’t there.”)
Now during recent walks, I’ve noticed a larger than usual number of discarded masks strewn along the road, tangled in hedges or lying next to Burger King boxes, McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A wrappers, cigarette butts and an occasional beer can. Where once those masks were mostly light blue, nowadays they’re more representative of the rainbow colors of Americans of all stripes; black, white, brown, or a combination of those and variations.
The broken straps on some I came across got me to wondering about the broken bodies, lives, finances and hopes of people who once bore those masks.
As I rounded the mall parking lot the other day, I happened across long lines of yellow parking cones leading up to canopies with “Vaccine Shots Here” hanging from tables underneath. I thought about the vaccine, the mask’s partner in purpose, that’s also feared and pilloried.
As I continued my walk and stared down at those discarded masks, I thought about how this thin piece of material, less than an ounce in weight, has been so politicized, become the focus of screaming, shouting, finger wagging during school board meetings and resulted in forced removal from airplanes of anti-maskers.
I mean c’mon now, who would have thought that an innocent little mask would be so loved by many, hated by others, and has emerged as a symbol of strength or defiance?
Who would have thought that masks and vaccines would become synonymous with the names of Dr. Tony Fauci or Dr. Sanjay Gupta on one hand or obstinate governors of southern states under COVID siege and spiraling infection rates on the other?
At the end of my journey, I suppose that you, like me, were thinking about the lives, motivations and current state of health of those who tossed aside those masks. Are they still with us, some clinging to life at the mercy of ventilators, or have they passed away? Have some healed after being infected and resumed their lives.
We’ll leave answers to those questions to speculation.
In the end as I climbed into my car at the end of my walk, I looked back and thought about those discarded masks and wanted to say to them, “we look forward to the day that you’ve finished your job and are no longer needed. But during the interim of uncertainty, I say thank you for standing tall as the stopgap between fact and fiction, between good sense and nonsense and, literally, between life and death.
Wrote renown American novelist William Faulkner, “You move a mountain one stone at a time.” Writes a far less famous yours truly,” You move a pandemic one mask (and vaccine) at a time!”[U1]
