Bill to ban mask mandates is a shortsighted failure. COVID isn’t as bad as it could get
Rep. Karey Hanks, R-St. Anthony, might not have a lot of good ideas, but she does pursue bad ideas with zeal and diligence.
Undeterred by the Senate’s decision last year to kill a bill she introduced to ban all state and local government entities from imposing mask mandates to prevent the spread of communicable diseases, she reintroduced the same bill Tuesday.
Let’s hope the House comes to its senses — it overwhelmingly passed Hanks’ bill last year — or the Senate remains level-headed. Because if that bill becomes law, it could worsen the current pandemic and leave the state unable to deal with the next one.
The bill, presented by an unmasked Hanks to an almost totally unmasked Senate State Affairs Committee, was introduced a week after crisis standards of care were reactivated in three health districts serving much of southern Idaho. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all people continue to wear masks in indoor settings – particularly N95 or KN95 masks, which are readily available.
The simple fact is that if no government agency can mandate masks, the problem will be worse than it would have been otherwise.
But there’s also a tremendous failure of imagination at play here. The omicron variant is far from as bad as things could get. While it’s highly contagious, vaccines are relatively good at preventing severe disease and death, and some studies suggest the strain itself is less potent than the delta variant, which fueled the last wave.
Things are likely to be much worse at some point in the future. We don’t know when it will happen, but pandemics have been a regular part of human life throughout history. What could the next one be?
MERS is a closely related coronavirus that first emerged in 2012, and has infected humans as recently as August. Its fatality rate appears to be about 35%, according to the World Health Organization. Luckily, it does not spread from person to person easily, so there have been only small, sporadic outbreaks.
But COVID-19 and lots of other coronaviruses do spread easily. What would happen if MERS mutated to become highly contagious? What would happen if a new COVID-19 strain emerged with the infectiousness of omicron but a lethality similar to MERS?
If Hanks’ shortsighted bill passes, we could not mandate masks as a way to fight that pandemic.
Epidemiologists have for years been terrified of a particular strand of avian influenza – H5N1. The disease periodically jumps from birds to people, causing small outbreaks throughout the world. It has a stunning 60% mortality rate. What happens if that becomes easily transmissible from human to human? It would make everything we’ve faced over the past two years seem like paradise in comparison.
But we wouldn’t be able to do something as simple as mandate masks in order to address the problem.
There are more mundane problems posed by the bill as well. As Rep. Greg Chaney, R-Caldwell, correctly pointed out during the debate last year, it is not uncommon for some violent prison inmates with communicable diseases to spit at guards, lawyers and others. The obvious thing to do to protect the people who have to be around such an inmate is to require that they wear a mask. Last year’s bill was so inexpertly crafted that it would have banned the practice.
But don’t expect any of this to move Hanks. She’s not the kind to think through the effects of a policy she proposes. Her reasoning is more simple.
“God formed us with our faces and with our smiles and with our ability to communicate in that manner,” she said in justification of her bill.
And if there were a much more deadly pandemic, she said, people would act appropriately on their own accord.
“If people were dying in the streets, and we felt that a mask would change that, then I believe that we would wear them,” Hanks said.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the inside of a COVID-19 ward, with dozens of patients dying alone, out of sight. People who might have lived if those around them wore a mask.