The advent of summer is allowing businesses such as churches and restaurants to operate outside, increasing evidence that the coronavirus has limited capacity outdoors. This is making it clear that all we need to return to relative normalcy, outside of basic social distancing precautions, are masks.
Contrary to the original official line, we've known for some time that masks, even homemade ones, are extremely effective at inhibiting the transmission of airborne respiratory diseases similarly sized to the coronavirus.
Yet Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has come under fire for a statewide mask mandate. In fact, he's got it just right.
Although the guidelines are effectively unenforceable, they make sense given Newsom's justifiable fear that the Golden State will suffer a late outbreak. The fact is, if you want things to return to normal without an alarming outbreak, you'll need to suck it up and wear a mask in public when it makes sense.
Newsom's mask mandate applies to people in or waiting in line to enter indoor public spaces. This makes sense, seeing as the risk of indoor transmission is significantly greater than outdoors. Masks also must be worn while getting healthcare services, in public transit or ride-sharing cars, in client-facing business roles, while working with food preparation and packaging, and when outdoors but unable to distance physically.
So, if you're at the park or beach or on a hike, you don't need a mask. If you're at a restaurant table, you don't need a mask. If you're walking with at least 6 feet of space between you and the next stranger, you don't need a mask.
These are not draconian rules. These are how we return to normal.
If you want baseball games, you'll have to suck it up and wear a mask while you get your beer and hot dogs. But you'll probably be able to take it off once you get to your slightly spread-out seats. If you want a manicure, you'll have to grin and bear it behind a mask. But an hour of sitting with a slightly annoying mask on is significantly better than seeing an entirely avoidable coronavirus case spike that both wrecks our healthcare capacity and threatens us all with another market crash and a business shutdown.
The dregs of the Left and Right have treated our coronavirus response as a binary ideological question. Between dictatorial Karens shaming and blaming normies for needing to put food on their tables and pseudoscientific coronavirus truthers who think we can reopen every nightclub, there lies practicality and truth. We'll have to deal with slightly limited capacities and an annoying amount of mask-wearing, but that will let us resume economic life without causing a rash of preventable deaths.
