Real life and Instagram life seem to be getting further and further out of touch, especially in the pandemic era. While news outlets report on thousands of new infections and deaths every day, people struggle to avoid being evicted and businesses shutter, post after post are filled with happy beachgoers and groups of friends hugging. Now, not all these posts are sans masks, but many are. The vibe I always get after a quick scroll through the app is that there are two selfish parties here (pun unintended): the performative mask-wearers who wear masks but still congregate and take pictures–rendering the occasional mask usage next to meaningless–and those who don’t at all and are just blatantly flaunting their lack of concern.
I’d like to start off with the basic fact that only wearing a mask does not make you invincible to the virus. There is a reason the CDC guidelines recommend mask-wearing and six feet of social distancing: because the main ways the virus spreads, according to the WHO, is person to person contact and through droplets. Masks will help block the droplets. But if you are within close proximity, transmission is still possible.
This may be common sense, but I could not count how many pictures I have seen of people with masks on, but literally with arms around each other. Clearly, common sense is not always so common.
It feels like these people aren’t wearing masks for the purpose of being protected from the coronavirus, but for the image of that. In that case, if they only wear the mask for the picture, and either take it off later or come in contact with each other, they are hardly better than everyone else, apparently, on the app: those who both congregate and not wear masks.
While“performative mask-wearing” is harmful, there’s no doubt it’s far, far worse when people don’t even wear them. I’m sure it’s not an unpopular opinion that large groups of friends acting like there is no pandemic going on while other people struggle with its consequences feels selfish and irresponsible.
I get that people just want to live their lives and if there are consequences, they will bear them on their own. But with a pandemic, the effects just aren’t isolated to individuals. If one person gets sick, it endangers their friends, family, community members and essential workers. It’s not simply a personal choice to go out because it has such far-reaching consequences.
Some of the most mind-boggling content to me comes from accounts who have posted on their stories about supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, climate justice and other social justice causes.
There is no drought of research that has proved the pandemic disproportionately affects people of color. The New York Times lists a myriad of reasons including racial disparities in healthcare, housing segregation and distribution of essential jobs. By taking the risk of getting the virus, people are covertly passing on that risk to the groups they claim to care about.
Selfish decision-making during the pandemic doesn’t only negatively affect other groups of people, but can even be linked to environmental concerns, which won’t help climate change activism at all. Single-use plastic usage has surged during the months of lockdown, according to Forbes. Restaurants, stores and people are all resorting to plastic gloves, bags and containers to be able to quickly sterilize. The longer the pandemic lasts, the more plastic will continue to flow into landfills and oceans.
After all, the more people go out, either with masks but close together, or just totally without them, the more prolonged the pandemic will be. While for those individuals it might not seem to matter all that much to take a seemingly small risk for themselves, the consequences will fall disproportionately on other groups of people, ones who never wanted to have to take that risk in the first place.
Image by Caroline Chen/The ECHO.
