End Oregon's Mask Mandate

Plus, a strange conversation with a Prius-driving future Oregonian

Oregon Governor Kate Brown actually wore this mask and posted about it December 9, 2020. It is how I will always remember her.

End Oregon’s Mask Mandate

Famously, Oregon has one of the strictest mask mandates in the country:

Oregon today stands alone in the nation with its outdoor mask rules, established in anticipation of college football games and the Pendleton Round-Up. Oregonians are required to wear masks outside not only at football games but also in parks, rooftop terraces and outdoor sporting fields when distancing isn’t possible. Washington, the only other state requiring outdoor masking, applies the rule solely to outdoor gatherings above 500 people.

Indeed, Oregon, under the perpetual emergency declarations of Governor Kate Brown, has been among the most aggressive states generally when it comes to regulations, closures and restrictions ascribed to combating Covid. The state’s schools were closed for longer than nearly any other state; businesses have been closed or severely restricted in their operations; the state has ordered the termination of health care workers who refuse to get vaccinated.

These restrictions have mostly been met with universal acclaim by the public health establishment and the mainstream media (although some of us in the decidedly not mainstream media have raised objections). But, with regard to the mask mandate, that appears to be changing.

The Oregonian recently pointed out the state has no target for relaxing the mask mandate, a mistake according to experts:

“I firmly believe that we need clear metrics to release mask mandates or public health officials will lose trust with the population,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.

Um, the trust has already been lost. Back in May 2021, NPR reported on a poll showing that only 41% of Americans trusted their state public health officials. That was before the Delta Variant surge of the summer, which led to an about-face on the vaccine-fueled optimism from public health officials and politicians that the pandemic would soon be over. Americans are surely less trusting of those officials today.

As yet another really contagious variant looms on the horizon, Europe struggles with a new surge, and highly vaccinated and super-duper careful states like Vermont (the Oregon of New England) suffer from high case numbers and hospitalizations, the reality that Covid is probably here to stay in one form or another just might be sinking in. Emergency mask mandates putatively targeting a short-term global crisis are one thing; “emergency” mask mandates targeting an ongoing at least partially seasonal disease the worst effects of which are prevented by vaccines and, now, post-infection anti-viral drugs are highly effective are quite another.

Accordingly, some previously mandate-enthused Democratic officials across the country have begun to turn against mandates. Colorado Governor Jared Polis recently said he wouldn’t reinstate a mask mandate in his progressive-leaning state despite a surge in Covid cases, pointing out that neighboring New Mexico had a mask mandate but was seeing a surge similar to that in Colorado. Refreshingly, Polis also observed that scientists didn’t know why the region was suffering a spike.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, presiding over a city that voted 92% for Joe Biden, recently lifted the city’s indoor mask mandate and urged people to get vaccinated.

While Brown was in Washington, D.C. earlier this week to attend the signing ceremony for the infrastructure bill, a reporter asked her what metrics she was looking at to determine when (if?) to life the mandate. While availing herself of the right to choose not to wear a mask outdoors that exists in DC but not in Oregon, Brown replied with her standard response, which is by now engrained in Oregonians’ consciousness like the remnants of the wagon tracks of the Oregon Trail outside Baker City: “We'll continue to follow the science and the data to keep Oregonians safe, to keep our schools open and our businesses thriving.”

As with, seemingly, everything about Covid, the data are, in fact, mixed. Some studies have shown that states with mask mandates have had slightly lower transmission rates. However, many of those studies were conducted early in the pandemic, before the widespread availability of vaccines, and when mask observance was presumably higher.

Moreover, looking at a 5-6% decrease in transmission in a vacuum is not the entire story. The mandates impose the government will on individuals in the form of regulating their behavior in a manner that appears to be marginally effective. Oregon has chosen to enforce its mask mandate by leaning on the the small businesses, schools and churches that control indoor and outdoor spaces. If there’s a violation of the mask mandate, it’s the person who controls the space that gets in trouble, not the individual who chose not to wear a mask. The mandates require business owners, teachers, school administrators, pastors, health care professionals, homeowners and home-renters, retail clerks, waiters, and many other Oregonians to do the state’s dirty work of enforcing the mandate, without compensation other than to avoid the sometime-veiled and sometimes-explicit threat of fines and closures.

As we settle in for a future with Covid that is not an emergency but instead a persistent endemic disease the worst effects of which can be relatively easily avoided, Oregon should ditch its mask mandate.

On Priuses, Sanskrit, and objectional cultural demographics

The Eager family was in Tucson, Arizona over the weekend to visit my mom. The visit was great, but what I really want to tell you about was an interaction the boys and I had with a woman in the neighborhood in which we were renting an AirBnB.

We went for a walk in the morning, before the heat of the day, as one does in places it’s not freezing. Toward the end of our stroll, we approached a woman getting out of her Prius in the driveway in front of her house. I noticed her Prius - one must always closely inspect them - had a bumper sticker in the shape of a character in a foreign alphabet - perhaps Sanskrit but all I really know is that it was kind of like the Artist Formerly Known as Prince symbol but it wasn’t that exactly.

Anyway, Aiden, seven, introduced himself, as is his habit, and included that we are from Oregon.

Woman: Where in Oregon?

Aiden: Bend.

Woman: Do you like Bend?

Aiden (touching a cactus in the woman’s yard): Yes, but that hurts.

Woman: Yes, it does. No, I mean do YOU (gesturing toward me) like it?

Me: Yes, it’s great. Cold winters though.

Woman: I’m moving to Oregon in about five months.

Me: Oh really, where to?

Woman: I think Hillsboro. I don’t like the cultural demographic in Bend.

Well. That’s a weird thing to say to a seven-year-old who just told you he’s from Bend, and his dad and five-year-old brother. Even weirder: by all appearances aside from the possibly Sanskrit bumper sticker, the woman was of the same “cultural demographic” as us, which is to say, U.S.-born white people who speak English as a first language.

Questions arose: Why would she sully Hillsboro with her immutable cultural demographic, which she finds objectionable? Which cultural demographics are desirable? Did she mean the culture of wearing puffy jackets and attaching a fold-out tent to your ride in the event you just have to camp? What was the meaning of the bumper sticker? Did she know that people of her cultural demographic are much more common in Oregon than in Arizona?

I demurred. I had already been trying to bring the conversation to a close as quickly as possible because that’s what I do. And I sure wasn’t going to ask the woman what on earth she was talking about.

I just said, “Ok, well, good luck in your move. You’ll love Oregon!”

And she will.