Wear a Mask
To the Editor:
My heartfelt prayers go out to Jeff Wick and his family who are under quarantine. As the good journalist he is, he shared with us in the Record that he has tested positive for the corona virus.
He also shared with us that he tried to wear a mask whenever possible. Many of the right wing writers in this opinion section of the Record who choose to hide behind our Constitution’s purported right to not be ordered in the interest of public safety by the government to wear a mask will use that fact as another excuse to refrain from bearing the minor discomfort of wearing a mask to save the lives and livelihood of others choosing instead to recklessly ignore the higher moral obligation to wear that mask out of respect for life.
Jeff indicated that he did not know how he may have been exposed to the coronavirus droplets that a mask would keep from spreading to others. Unlike the flu, those droplets containing the coronavirus drift as much as 16 feet away and hang in the air for hours. Medical science indicates that those who refuse to wear a mask especially in close quarters and are contagious but asymptomatic are the most likely to infect others and that, even if they were contagious, their wearing of a mask would reduce the chances of infecting another person not wearing a mask to 1 out of 20 with an even lesser chance of infecting another person wearing a mask.
If the mask one wears is a N-95 mask, then one’s chances of being infected by a contagious person without a mask is only about 1 out of 100. There is no reason why in this richest country on earth President Trump failed to exercise his power under the National Production Act to have every American supplied with adequate N-95 masks that would save tens of thousands of lives in a raging war that has now claimed the lives of more than a quarter of a million Americans. Instead, Trump and Sean Hannity and Fox & Friends and the New York Post (like Fox News, also owned by a right wing extremist, Rupert Murdoch, who profits from ratings by not reporting the truth) painted a different picture of this pandemic for months on end. Even this past week, one of the televised talking heads of Fox News proclaimed that the need for gatherings of extended families to wear a mask this Thanksgiving (except while eating and preferably outdoors and spaced far apart) is “garbage.”
Shame on those who refuse to wear a mask to save lives even the lives of their own extended families! Instead of frequenting bars and indoor restaurants and small and large gatherings where almost no masks are being worn in Fayette County, let us hope we all stayed home with our immediate family this Thanksgiving and prayed for Jeff and his family at the table and encouraged one another to respect their life and the lives of all of the people of Fayette County by how we conduct ourselves during this pandemic.
John W. Mikus
Fayetteville