Impact of pandemic on future mask use is difficult to estimate, researchers say

It is not simple to estimate what the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will be on the collective memory and on people’s behavior on issues such as the use or not of masks in the coming decades.

The circumstances in which the disease emerged, which include an immense amount of information and fake news in real time and the rise of the far right around the world, could end up having contradictory effects, say researchers. This can occur both to exacerbate and to minimize the historical burden of the virus’s advance.

“Of course, from an epidemiological point of view, the pandemic continues to exist. At the same time, socially, we have been living the post-pandemic period for some time”, ponders sociologist and political scientist Vinícius Rauber e Souza, PhD in public policy from UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) and professor at the University of Passo Fundo (RS).

In fact, this seems to be the consensus among experts. Infectious agents rarely stop circulating completely in the human population, even after producing natural immunity or death in most of their victims, as was the case before the invention of vaccines.

As it is difficult to establish an objective and indisputable line that separates the pandemic situation from the normal levels of spread of a disease, it is people’s behavior towards the disease that often ends up defining its classification.

There are indications that this is what happened in the so-called Spanish flu, which killed tens of millions of people from 1918 onwards.

“It is common to highlight the waves of 1918 and 1919, but in 1920 there was another very serious wave of flu. It turns out that people were so tired of protective measures that nothing more serious was done”, says anthropologist Beatriz Klimeck. , PhD student in public health at Uerj (University of the State of Rio de Janeiro), citing the book “A Grande Gripe”, by the American historian John Barry.

In the case of Covid-19, the feeling that someone who has been through two years of a pandemic may be that of having lived with it for decades — and this also contributes to this type of distortion or erasure.

“It is possible to notice that the ease of forgetting is very great”, says historian Beatriz Kushnir, from the Graduate Program in Documents and Archives Management at Unirio (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro).

“A lot of people now can’t remember what the situation was like in March and April 2020, when there was that desperation about leaving home, and now they talk about social isolation as if it were an extraterrestrial thing”, says Kushnir, who coordinated the Testimonies of Isolation project, which collected hundreds of testimonies from ordinary people about the first months of the pandemic. At Unicamp, historian Ana Carolina Delfim Maciel coordinates a similar work on the platform “Covid-19 Memories”.

Furthermore, behavior changes should not be expected to affect different countries and regions uniformly, recalls Rauber e Souza.

The sociologist points out that the epidemics of respiratory diseases in the first decade of the 21st century, such as the H1N1 flu, strengthened the habit of wearing masks in countries like China, but were not enough to create the same culture of collective protection in the US, although the country has also been affected by the problem.

Despite these barriers, is it still possible to talk about Covid-19 legacies for the public health of the future? Beatriz Klimeck says that, in her doctoral research, an important element that has emerged is the perception of the importance of aerosols (suspension of small particles in the air) for the transmission of Covid and other respiratory diseases, something that was not clear before. for the scientific community itself.

“The idea that the aerosols that are the main way of transmitting the disease are produced when talking, singing, screaming is a very important turning point and a great gain in terms of public health knowledge, precisely because it shows how much safer it is to stay outdoors than indoors,” she says.

“There are amazing photos from 1918, with outdoor classes, barbers and hairdressers working in open spaces. It’s an understanding of airborne contagion that we can recover.”

At least in Brazil, the prestige of vaccination as a form of prevention also leaves relatively intact from the pandemic years, despite the denialism propagated by President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies.

This is the result of an institutional culture in favor of vaccination that has lasted four decades, says Beatriz Kushnir. “We have that image of Serra vaccinating Lula, showing that this has always crossed partisan barriers.”

Despite this, it is not clear to what extent the memory of what happened in these years of pandemic will be able to mark the historical consciousness of the next generations. “If even the horrors of World War II couldn’t change the way people lived in society, you can’t say that Covid-19 would have that effect,” says Kushnir.

On the other hand, the experience of facing a totally unknown disease is something that most 21st century societies had not yet experienced.

“In 1918, at the time of the Spanish flu, people died of infectious diseases all the time, so there was a certain familiarity with that. John Barry to Scientific American magazine.