Just Wear The Damn Mask Already
If you wear a mask today when you visit a polling place (or anywhere you might go), you are almost certainly at a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than if you went unmasked. Let’s say that with a little less nuance for the people in the back: Wear a mask.
Look, this is definitely an issue on which scientific understanding has evolved. When the pandemic began, there wasn’t a lot of data about the effectiveness of homemade cloth masks. Scientists -- including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- were left to make educated guesses about the balance between the benefits of mask wearing and the risks of its unintended consequences. But now we have a lot more data, and the data strongly suggests that masks matter.
Frankly, even the scientists who question the effectiveness of homemade masks, like the University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm, aren’t saying you should just live life like your pre-pandemic normal. Instead, those researchers think the right choice is being heavily isolated from other people, far more so than most of us are right now.
For your sake -- and the sake of others around you -- wear a mask to the polls.