An opinion poll released this Wednesday (20) shows that 56% of Americans are in favor of wearing masks on any form of public transport. With the predictable politicization of public health, support for the protection item is three times higher among those who identify as Democrats than among Republicans.
On Monday, an inexperienced and unqualified federal judge — appointed, of course, by Donald Trump — overturned the mandatory use of face masks on flights and other modes of transportation recommended by the Biden administration. In a few hours, she released general.
The largest US airlines have announced that they will no longer require masks on board. States and municipalities have independence to regulate public health on local transport lines. New York will not follow Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s stupidity, but confusion has been installed, as the so-called tri-state area – New York, New Jersey and Connecticut – has an interconnected system used daily by more than 10 million passengers.
January and February 2022 are among the five deadliest months of the pandemic in the United States. Covid is now the third leading cause of death in the country and, for six months, the number of daily deaths has exceeded 1,000.
In this context of inexplicable normalization of illness and death, Joe Biden this week fired the following blunder: the use of a mask is an individual decision.
I’m not here to question the president’s cognitive acuity, but how can an infectious disease that has killed close to 1 million Americans be subdued without collective health measures? This form of individualism so associated with US culture, but also epidemic in Brazil since the beginning of the quarantine, brings the acceptance of something as amoral as cruel.
In the US alone, 7 million people are in the group whose comorbidities make them especially vulnerable to such an individual decision. It is adults and seniors who will have to better calculate the risk of engaging in routines such as buying food or going into a bank branch. Above all, they are adults whose livelihood can depend on face-to-face work — and countless companies are taking advantage of the lack of official cohesion in this real health emergency to reduce remote work options.
Vaccination coverage in the US continues to vary from state to state, with Republican-dominated areas reporting rates as low as 51% of adults immunized.
The supposed fatalism shown in the rejection of simple measures such as the use of masks is, in fact, a sign of privilege, as deaths among racial minorities, the elderly and low-income people are more numerous. And it’s not new: it’s the same complacent behavior with the staggering annual number of victims of gun massacres.
The abdication demonstrated in Joe Biden’s comment on individual choice, in addition to suggesting electoral concern that he promised not to interfere in the fight against the pandemic, is based on an absurd dichotomy. Living with Covid is not a choice between punishing the population with severe restrictions and nihilistic abandonment in relation to the evolution of the virus.
There are local measures that can be turned on and off according to the infection rate. The US started 2020 as the most prepared country in the world to fight a pandemic. Ongoing failure is a choice, not a destiny.
