As we noted on Monday, foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia reimposed its indoor masking mandate. Now The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that while a few universities have done this, no other major city in the country has followed Philadelphia’s lead.
Philly’s return of masks gets both eyerolls and support from residents. Can health officials bridge this divide?
After two years of changing restrictions and messages, some Philadelphians predict the latest rule change won’t go well.
by Tom Avril and Jason Laughlin | Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Under warm blue skies that seemed at odds with the recent rise of COVID-19, shoppers at Roosevelt Mall seemed united on Tuesday in a quest to finish errands quickly and get back outside in the sun.
But as for opinions on the return of Philadelphia’s mask mandate — which takes effect in businesses including those very same stores on Monday — errand-runners were sharply divided.
Harold Phillips, 50, of Germantown, said the restriction made sense, given that one-third of Philadelphians are not fully vaccinated.
“They should’ve never stopped it,” he said of the mask mandate, as he headed into a Snipes shoe store. “I did the research. I got the shots.”
There’s more at the original, but this is the one picture that says it all. Mr Phillips said that the city should never have ended the mask mandate when it did, but there’s the Inquirer’s caption with the photo: Mr Phillips himself “left his mask in his car while shopping at Roosevelt Mall.” It’s apparent that Mr Phillips didn’t take his stated position that the city should never have ended the mask mandate too seriously, or he’d have been wearing a mask, mandate or otherwise.
The mask mandate does not go into effect until next Monday, because the city wanted to give business owners, who had been living with the mandate from July of 2020 through March 1, 2022, time to “adjust” to the new mandate. Apparently the virus will simply take a week off.
Of course, with that beard, he’d never be able to meet the CDC’s facial hair guidelines for a closely fitting mask anyway.
The Inquirer article continues to note another person on the street, one who did not believe that the reinstated mandate was necessary, and that it would be widely ignored.
The pandemic has been a communications nightmare for public health officials. Conditions keep changing along with new variants and interventions like vaccines or treatments. The hope that vaccination would end the pandemic has been tamped down as time has shown vaccinated people can spread the virus asymptomatically.
At least the Inquirer has admitted what we’ve known for months now: fully vaccinated and boostered people can contract the virus anyway, and they can spread it to others even if they are completely asymptomatic. In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.”
If everybody’s going to contract the virus anyway, there’s no reason to impose onerous restrictions on individuals, but, hey, it’s Philly, and authoritarians gotta authoritarian!