Thread by @Loretta_Torrago

"After 2 years, growing calls to take masks off come from me, some other moms I found and a pediatrician. But most scientists I asked think masks are no big deal"
So why did this pointless article get published? 🧵npr.org/2022/01/28/107…

It should tell you something that Kerry Dingle, who the opening 5 paragraphs of this article are devoted to, feels the need to say that, though she thinks masks should be optional, she is not “anti-vax” or “psychotic.”

Having gotten that out of the way, Dingle quickly moves on to bemoan the “burdening” of little kids with "protecting other people”; namely, "high-risk people."

It’s ironic to talk of the high-risk as if they were the burden when, if I’m being honest, it’s the low risk that seem most burdensome at this point. Here I’m thinking of the low risk’s insatiable & ill-timed need to free themselves of pandemic paraphernalia (like masks).

But neither the author nor Dingle see themselves as the burden because, I guess, they are used to centering themselves in the world and then begrudging having to incorporate “other people” like “high-risk people” into it.

"Isn’t it enough that these pesky others 'can protect themselves' by getting vaccinated – what else could high-risk people possibly want?", you can hear Dingle ask between the lines while the author nods along.

Even putting aside the casual ableism, kids under 5 can’t protect themselves. Neither can children of anti-vax parents. So yeah, I’m not buying the whole “little kids” vs. “high-risk people” epic showdown vibe of Dingle. But back to more mundane complaints.

Panning out from the Dingle-eye view, we see that there are anti-mask mandates groups, pro-N95 groups and a third group that’s both anti-mask and pro-vaccine. They are “getting louder” we are told.

How could we not know they are loud? After all, we are stuck reading this article & not some other, more interesting article about, say, pandemics and airborne infection. No, we are stuck in an eternal hell of privileged people speaking loudly about things that bum them out.

But who am I to make light of bummers? Good masks are hard to find. There. That’s surely a problem. Jeremy Howard, a data scientist, thinks so too.

Howard says if kids can’t find good masks, this is a “huge issue” because “Kids are being left unprotected.” Howard says this as if lack of protection is a problem, not realizing that this is the goal.

Moving on, Danny Benjamin, a pediatrician, admits transmission is lowered by mandating that kids wear masks in school.

But that’s “impractical” Benjamin says as if the standard of pandemic protection was the “practical” shoes a grandmother might wear. Benjamin adds that kids find masks "uncomfortable", as if he hadn’t noticed that kids get used to wearing braces, on their teeth, of all things.

Masks also have to be “replaced often” Benjamin says wrongly.

Bernadette Ngoh wants to know, “What do we do with all the kids that are unable to wear the mask…?”

Brittany Gonzalez then appears, as if on cue, to answer that, for the kids who are unable, masks are not required. Good idea; but maybe add better ventilation.

"What about brains?" you ask. Isn’t it “harder to hear and understand speech and identify facial expressions and emotions when people are wearing masks?”

I don’t know how to answer this honestly. It’s harder to eat with plastic spoons. It’s harder to run than to walk. Is it super hard? No. And by the way, there are entire countries where half the population wears head coverings and they have children whose brains are just fine.

But the problem of brains, whatever it is, hasn’t gone away which leaves Manfred Spitzer, a psychiatrist and a cognitive neuroscientist, to give it a try.

Spitzer valiantly invokes some sort of Darwinian, quasi-evolutionary anti-mask argument saying “Babies were never designed to just see the upper half of the face...” So please, nobody show Mr. Spitzer forks and spoons or, come to think of it, the Olympics.

Granting the “babies aren’t designed for masks point”, they sure do pretty well with them which seems important.

But if you really can’t get over this, there are clear masks.

The rest of the article goes on to be more specific about problems that don’t exist, or that have obvious solutions like using microphones to hear mask-muffled-voices or reducing background noise.

Even Spitzer, our evolutionary “What are babies designed for?” theorist, admits that the challenges masks present are manageable.

In which case, really, if masks are manageable, can be done with these small problems with easy solutions and get on to dealing with the big problem we have now; namely, the pandemic?