October 2022

I have just returned from a short trip to the London area. While I was down there I caught a cold. Having tested myself every second day for a week, I was reasonably sure it wasn’t covid, so I felt safe to fly home. However, I decided to wear a mask on the journey, to protect my fellow-humans from any lingering common cold germs, especially as I was still coughing and blowing my nose rather more frequently than usual, and I didn’t want anyone to feel threatened. Masks, as everyone ought to know by now, don’t give much protection to the wearer unless they are hospital-grade, but they protect other people from the wearer’s germs. In the Far East it has long been considered ordinary good manners to wear a face mask in public spaces if you have a cold.

As I progressed from bag-drop to security to the departure lounge, I don’t think I saw a single mask on a passenger, and precious few on the staff. A huge multinational airport, with people flying in from all over the world, is the likeliest place of all to encounter something nasty in the way of a virus from an exotic place. Haven’t people learned anything from the covid pandemic?

Over the past months I have seen a lot of little notices at the entrances to shops and public transport, asking people to help keep everyone safe by wearing a mask, sanitising hands and keeping their distance. The notices are usually small and inconspicuous and nobody is taking any notice of them at all. Why would shops, airports, public libraries etc. be asking people (timidly) to wear masks if we didn’t all secretly recognise that masks protected us from viruses? And why haven’t they got the courage to make the notices twice the size, and have someone standing beside them to encourage people to take some notice of them?

I am absolutely certain that it should still be a legal requirement, properly enforced, to wear them in public places – shops, cinemas, trains, buses and planes etc. The pandemic isn’t over. People may not be dying in such large numbers, hospitals may not have so many beds taken up with covid patients, but has no-one noticed how many shops, offices and schools have recently been closed for a day or so because there aren’t enough staff to run them? One person has come in with covid and infected enough of his fellow-workers to close them down. Isn’t that damaging the economy? And is there anyone in Britain who doesn’t know at least one person who is still off work with Long Covid weeks after contracting the disease?

And why are people in this country so bothered about being ordered to wear masks anyway? When I was young, there were no such things as seat-belts in cars. When it became a legal requirement, there was a storm of protest about civil liberties, the validity of the evidence that it did any good, people who would need to be exempted for medical reasons, etc. In the end people have accepted them. When smoking started being banned in most public spaces, there was an outcry. Now it is taken as normal.

Most people would now consider driving over the speed limit or driving when you have been drinking a disgrace, given that it is obvious you are endangering other people’s lives by doing so. Well, you are endangering them by not wearing a mask as well. Winter is now upon us. This is the season for colds, flu and noroviruses. And covid? We shall see…