Lifting NC mask mandates may be pragmatic, but it’s also a surrender

Less than a month ago, North Carolina was breaking records for new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. Officials were urging us to wear better masks, and the Biden administration arranged for 400 million N95 masks to be available for free across the country.

Now, we’re debating whether it’s time to start taking those masks off.

A growing number of red and blue states, including New York and Massachusetts, have ended statewide mask mandates as COVID cases begin to trend downward. Here in North Carolina, more school boards are voting to make masks optional again, and Mecklenburg County is expected to consider lifting its mask mandate this week. That’s a notable shift from the county’s previous statements that it would not lift the mask mandate until the percent positivity rate remained below 5% for consecutive days. Currently, the county’s percent positivity rate is around 18%.

So what’s changed?

Deciding whether to forgo mask mandates is tricky, particularly because it has public health experts divided. CDC guidance still says that masks should be worn in areas of moderate to high transmission, or wherever the percent positivity rate exceeds 8%. Most of the country — including all of North Carolina — still falls in that category, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has said “now is not the moment” to be lifting mask mandates.

Others say that providing relief from masks now might help with mask compliance down the road if a new, more severe COVID variant arrives, though it’s possible that such flip-flopping could further destroy credibility. Some just think it’s time to start focusing on a “new normal,” one in which we learn to live with COVID instead of trying to fight it. We can’t wear masks forever. People are ready to move on.

And to some extent, they already have. Most mask mandates have been only sporadically followed and almost never enforced. It’s not uncommon to walk into a grocery store or attend a sporting event and be met with a sea of maskless faces.

Still, we should acknowledge that choosing to “move on” from the pandemic has a significant cost. For immunocompromised North Carolinians, as well as parents of children under 5 who can’t yet be vaccinated, the virus still poses a very real threat. Many people will still choose to wear masks in public, mandate or not, and that choice should be respected, not ridiculed.

North Carolina, of course, does not have a statewide mask mandate, and hasn’t since Gov. Roy Cooper lifted it in May 2021. Since then, decisions about masks and other restrictions have been delegated to school boards and local governments, many of which imposed mask mandates during the delta and omicron surges.

That’s a detail that N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore and other Republican lawmakers have conveniently chosen to ignore. Moore and his colleagues have blamed Cooper and the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services for “onerous restrictions that harm our children,” despite the fact that a law passed by the state legislature in August leaves decisions about masking up to individual school districts. Moore said last week that the House now plans to propose new legislation that would eliminate mask requirements in North Carolina schools.

Republicans have rallied against COVID mitigation measures from the start, spouting lies and half-truths, and masks have been a primary target. With mask fatigue rising, that resistance is gaining momentum, making it almost impossible to ignore. It’s symptomatic of just how politicized the pandemic has become — the gap between public opinion and public health guidance has only grown wider with time. Maybe it was officials’ inability to effectively communicate. Maybe it was the public’s unwillingness to listen. Or maybe the politicizing of masks won out in the end.

Either way, lifting mask mandates now feels like a surrender — an acknowledgment that too many people aren’t concerned with what science or officials say, or that thousands of deaths per day has somehow become acceptable. The masks may be coming off soon, but they’ve already revealed so much about us.