Masking and the State of the Union. Was the right message sent?
The US House Chamber will be among the lowest-risk indoor environments imaginable. Meanwhile, members boycotting over a testing requirement is the worst kind of virtue signaling.
Note: In an earlier version of this article, I assumed more Democrats would be wearing masks at the State of the Union address. For transparency and clarity, I have struck the original opening, and indicated the revised new text in bold.
The State of the Union address is poised to create what I believe will be some indelible images. On one side of the aisle will be a phalanx of masked Democrats; on the other side, a contrasting band of unmasked Republicans and some empty chairs.
The State of the Union address was the first large indoor federal government event since early in the Covid-19 pandemic that didn't require masks. A few still wore masks, but basically the event was a coming-out party for Congressional faces. Still, some wore masks and a handful of Republicans refused to attend at all, protesting the coronavirus testing requirement.
This was all made possible, of course, by the recent announcement of a new policy that attendees would not be required to wear a mask during the event, but that a negative coronavirus test would still be necessary. (A similar policy was enacted at the White House and went into effect today, provided staffers are fully vaccinated.)
First, was the new optional mask policy for the SOTU a good idea? From a scientific standpoint, I think the overall policy is actually pretty safe for the attendees themselves, even though given current case counts in Washington DC, a gathering of that size might typically carry up to a 90% chance of being host to at least one SARS-CoV-2-infected person. But the real risk in that room was nearly 100-times lower. Universal vaccination and boosting likely decreased the risk to some degree (yes, still, despite Omicron). But the main reason the room was likely to be quite safe, was not any symptom checklist or documented proof of immunity, but the testing requirement. Assuming the required tests were PCR assays, the chance that anyone in the room was infected at the time of the event was likely closer to, if not well under, 1%. That’s how good the tests are. Yes, even with a recent negative coronavirus test, it is technically possible that someone in the room could have been positive and harboring an early case of Covid-19. There was always the small chance of a false negative. And there may even have been individuals who happened to have been infected just a few hours before their test was administered, making the infection too early to detect, even by the most sensitive assays. But the likelihood that anyone in the room was both positive and contagious would seem to be very low.
So, from the standpoint of public health, maintaining a mask requirement probably wouldn’t have added much protection. In fact, the US House Chamber, which stages the event, would have to be considered one of the most secure large gathering spaces imaginable, both from the perspective of personal security and Covid-disease surveillance.
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Does that mean that anyone masking was virtue signaling and everyone not masking will be “following the science”? No. Both sides were virtue signaling. They’ll simply be signaling different things.
Those who masked were, in essence, masking in solidarity with people who are not yet able to be vaccinated (including children under age 5, like mine) or for people with severe immune compromise in whom the vaccines don’t provide enough protection. In my view, this isn’t exactly the “fear mongering” that Democrats have been accused of. (And the fact that so few Democrats masked might reflect political winds much as anything else). After all, it’s not like we’ve exited the emergency phase of this pandemic. The 7-day average for Covid-19 mortality currently remains over 2,000 per day. Also, our current 7-day average for new Covid-19 cases remains above 72,000, which isn’t exactly spectacular. While at some point, the daily risk, even to unvaccinated or under-protected people, will be low enough that it will be safe to go to a one-way masking regimen (for those who need to), my personal feeling, informed by the data above, is that we just are not there yet.
For their part, the Republicans as a group have propagandized against masks so effectively in its own echo chamber—converting what is basically an inconvenience into a symbol of oppression—that even Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently referred to masks as “the Scarlett Letter of this pandemic.” Given that wearing a mask for an hour or two is not exactly torture (surgeons have been wearing them for hours on end for years, without complaint), this is all performance art. It’s not that these lawmakers are worried that they’ll be seen as “not giving a damn”; they’re hoping that is precisely the message that will be sent.
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The House managers had little choice, by the way, but to make masks optional. Had they kept the mask mandate in place, some members would have used the moment to make a little spectacle of themselves flouting the rules, as some did while the House mask mandate was active. Denying them this free publicity made sense.
Prevented from hijacking the SOTU to put on an anti-masking dog-and-pony show, some Republicans skipped the event, in protest of the testing requirement. There was no justification for this. Testing takes 5 seconds. Boycotting the event was pure virtue signaling—that is, if selfishness is a virtue to them, which it appears to be.
Republican supporters, of course, will applaud anything that “sticks it to the Dems.” But I would remind everyone that after the first wave (including during the vaccine era, the Delta, and Omicron waves), Republican states have been hit the hardest in terms of both Covid-19 and all-cause excess mortality. Whenever members of Congress rip their masks off in defiance of mandates, or choose to stay home instead of taking a quick test, many of their supporters cheer. What they don’t realize is that are they, in effect, cheering attitudes that have needlessly killed members of their own communities, if not their own families.
Still, I worry that without an explicit statement, continued masking by Democrats (at the State of the Union and elsewhere, especially when recent testing is not universal) may be misinterpreted by the public—and tacitly if inadvertently, even by some of the members themselves—as undermining the power of our public health tools. Right now, the combination of vaccines and recently performed tests—and really, even just the tests themselves—constitutes a virtually seamless plan. Wearing a mask in the House chambers tonight is unlikely to prevent a single case of Covid-19 among attendees and their close contacts. But given where we still are as a nation, the message that masking will send might prevent many clinically important cases just about everywhere else.
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