I know what you were thinking this morning — better wear that mask on your way out the door, right?
But hang on, there, Dr. Anthony Fauci will spare you the trouble:
“We’ve got to make that transition,” Fauci said about vaccinated people who are still wearing face masks when outdoors, during a Thursday morning interview with CBS’s Gayle King.
This raises an interesting point. I got my second vaccination shot over the weekend, but it’s been ages since I wore a mask outside routinely. In fact, looking back into the haze of the pandemic year, I’m not sure I ever did.
I haven’t been back to Washington in a while because of the pandemic. But I am told that people there actually do wear masks outside, even now — which is crazy, really. They’ve been doing it this whole time, I guess — who knew? But aside from there and maybe New York, do people anywhere actually do this?
Where I live, masks exist so that we can keep schools and churches open. I carry a mask around so that I can go into stores or go into restaurants and wait to be seated. With the sole exception of volunteering at our school for recess duty, I haven’t worn a mask outside since… what, maybe last December, when I took my children ice skating at an outdoor rink?
In fact, now that people are getting vaccinated, I see more of them going without masks indoors, as well. I recently visited an office whose maskless principal told me he was vaccinated. I was fine with that, but I told him I wasn’t yet, so I would wear a mask anyway while I was visiting his business space. I intend to keep wearing masks indoors, if only to mollify the scolds, but you really don’t see people running around with masks on outside nowadays.
At the very least, I take Fauci’s comment the way I would take it if someone told me, “Oh, it’s OK to eat red meat after all.” Just another sign that the public health bureaucracy in Washington vastly overestimates its influence over most of the country.
