Opinion
What Is It With Trump and Face Masks?
It’s not about freedom or culture. It’s cynical
politics.
Paul
Krugman
By Paul
Krugman
Opinion
Columnist
Sept. 17,
2020
Believe it
or not — and I know many people will refuse to believe it — right now New York
City may be among the best places in America to avoid catching the coronavirus.
In New York
State as a whole, the number of people dying daily from Covid-19 is only
slightly higher than the number killed in traffic accidents. In New York City,
only around 1 percent of tests for the coronavirus are coming up positive,
compared with, for example, more than 12 percent in Florida.
How did New
York get here from the nightmarish days of April? It’s no mystery: partial herd
immunity might be a small factor, but mainly the state did simple, obvious
things to limit virus transmission. Bars are closed; indoor dining is still
banned. Above all, there’s a face-mask mandate that people generally obey.
New York
isn’t the only such success story. At first, Arizona’s Republican governor,
Doug Ducey, did everything wrong; not only did he keep the bars open, but he
refused to let the (mostly Democratic) mayors of the state’s biggest cities
impose local face-mask mandates. The result was a huge spike in cases: For a
few weeks in July almost as many people were dying daily in Arizona, population
seven million, as in the whole European Union, population 446 million.
But by then
Ducey had reversed course, closing bars and gyms. He didn’t impose a statewide
mask mandate, but he allowed cities to take action. And both cases and deaths
plummeted, although not to New York levels.
In other
words, we know what works. Which makes it both bizarre and frightening that
Donald Trump has apparently decided to spend the final weeks of his re-election
campaign deriding and discouraging mask-wearing and other anti-pandemic
precautions.
Trump’s
behavior on this and other issues is sometimes described as a rejection of
science, which is true as far as it goes.
After all,
his mask skepticism isn’t just at odds with what almost every outside expert
has said, it’s in direct conflict with what his own health officials — people
like Robert Redfield, the Trump-appointed head of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention — are saying. Just hours passed between Redfield’s
declaration, in congressional testimony, that masks are “the most important,
powerful public health tool we have” in fighting the pandemic and Trump saying
that “there’s a lot of problems with masks.”
But I think
it’s also important to understand the point I was trying to make with my New
York and Arizona examples: The case for masks doesn’t rest merely on detailed
scientific research that laypeople may find hard to understand. At this point
it’s also confirmed by the lived experience of regions that suffered severe
coronavirus outbreaks but brought them under control.
So how can
anti-masker agitation still be a major factor impeding America’s ability to
cope with this pandemic?
You
sometimes see people suggesting that wearing face masks is somehow inconsistent
with America’s individualistic culture. And if that were true it would be a
condemnation of that culture. After all, there’s something very wrong with any
definition of freedom that includes the right to gratuitously expose other
people to the risk of disease and death — which is what refusing to wear a mask
in a pandemic amounts to.
But I don’t
believe that this is a deep-seated cultural phenomenon. Some might dismiss the
widespread compliance I see all around me by saying that New York doesn’t
represent Real America™. But even leaving aside the fact that 21st-century
America is mainly urban — almost half of Americans live in metropolitan areas
with more than one million people — would they say the same about Arizona?
And bear in
mind that as long as I can remember, many shops and restaurants have had signs
on their doors proclaiming “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” How many of these
establishments have been stormed by mobs of bare-chested protesters?
In short,
anti-mask agitation isn’t really about freedom, or individualism, or culture.
It’s a declaration of political allegiance, driven by Trump and his allies.
But why
make a partisan issue out of what should be straightforward public health
policy? The fairly obvious answer is that we’re looking at the efforts of an
amoral politician to rescue his flailing campaign.
The
economy’s partial snapback from its plunge early this year hasn’t given Trump
the political dividends he hoped for. His attempts to stir up panic with claims
that radical activists are going to destroy the suburbs haven’t gained
traction, with voters generally seeing Joe Biden as the better candidate to
maintain law and order.
And it’s
probably too late to change the views of the majority of voters believing that
he has given up on fighting the coronavirus.
So his
latest ploy is an attempt to convince people that the Covid-19 threat is over.
But widespread mask-wearing is a constant reminder that the virus is still out
there. Hence Trump’s renewed push against the simplest, most sensible of public
health precautions.
As a
political strategy, this ploy probably won’t work. But it will lead to a lot of
unnecessary deaths.
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