But it’s not just that many liberals are still wearing masks, even outdoors, purely to signal to random passersby that they aren’t Republicans. At the same time, to admit out loud that you don’t enjoy masking — or even that you look forward to removing your mask after you’ve been vaccinated — has become a bizarre third rail: how can you even talk about what’s comfortable when 500,000 people are dead?! In some ways, the political posturing surrounding masks is reminiscent of the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, when questioning the necessity of, say, removing one’s shoes at the airport was seen as something akin to treason. The fact that a person was vastly more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the airport than in a terrorist in-flight shoe bombing was compelling to no one; the fear of another attack (or in the case of Covid-19, another infectious wave) had dialled our risk tolerance down so close to zero that no precaution, no matter how disruptive to our daily lives, could be considered too much to ask. After all, what’s a little inconvenience in the name of fighting terrorism? Is your comfort more important than human lives?! Why do you hate America? All of this might be dismissed as nothing more than the latest, dumbest skirmish in the culture wars, except that this one, unfortunately, is having wider repercussions on the landscape of public health. At this point, America’s best hope of returning to living, working, and socialising as we did before is to vaccinate as many people as possible — and to persuade hesitant parties that it’s in their best interest to get jabbed, because once they do, they can get back to normal.