The people who plan on wearing masks forever

Michael Bizzaro, a Colorado teacher, told me that while he doesn’t particularly enjoy wearing a mask, he’s noticed health benefits beyond not getting (or spreading) COVID-19. “Being a public-school teacher, there are multiple times a year that I get sick,” he said. “Being in the presence of lots of teenagers, I get colds quite often. I’m affected pretty badly by seasonal allergies.” Even though he has gone back to teaching in person, he told me, “I have not had any sort of sickness — a cough, a sneeze, a fever, anything — since the pandemic started.” For Bizzaro, continuing to wear a mask in a post-COVID world is somewhat of a no-brainer. “It’s not even a minor inconvenience wearing the mask, so why not wear it in the future?” Lexi McCoy, who works at a coffee shop-cum-record store in Los Angeles, has also noticed that her health has actually improved since masking up. “I feel like every other month, I was sick, with colds or whatever,” she said of the before times. “It was really messing up my life. I am in a band and I play shows. When I was getting sick all the time, I would lose my voice and I couldn’t sing.” McCoy couldn’t figure out why she was always under the weather. “I thought, This is my life. I just get sick all the time.” Then came the pandemic. She stopped playing shows, started wearing a mask at work, and wearing gloves to handle cash from customers. “This is the longest stretch of time I have ever not gotten sick,” she said. She acknowledges that perhaps this is due to going out a lot less, not sharing microphones at concerts, etc. But mask-wearing, she believes, has also played a major role. “Some people might say it would be dramatic to keep wearing a mask when masks aren’t mandated anymore, but I think if it protects yourself and others, it’s a good call.” Wearing a mask in public has been commonplace in parts of East Asia for upward of 100 years following several epidemics there.