Happy COVID Halloween, the only day when Americans can unite in appropriate fear of masks

One of my favorite memories of the pandemic — which, granted, is not a very competitive category — concerns another occasion associated with fear and unusual outdoor activity: Halloween.

It happened shortly before our second coronavirus-haunted Halloween at a costume store in the East Village, one of the best places in America to get what you need to dress up for Halloween or, for that matter, any other imaginable purpose. Since it was the fall of 2021 in COVID-ravaged New York City and, more to the point, a store where people go to buy masks, it was the last place a person was expected to enter without a face covering and obnoxiously object to wearing one like everyone else. And yet that’s exactly what happened.

Fortunately, the dispute was resolved without violence, though not without a humiliating excoriation of the ad hoc protester by the store clerk, a typically uncompromising member of the New York service industry. It was a memorably absurd juxtaposition of an annual, nationwide, completely voluntary celebration of masks with a faction of Americans refusing to wear them on any other day even if it might save someone’s life.

A few months earlier, an acquaintance had lamented a photo of my daughter wearing a mask to preschool as evidence of a national tragedy inflicted on innocent youths. But the masks bothered my child and her classmates no more than their socks; they had never known otherwise or, unlike much of the country, attached any inappropriate significance to the practice. Every controversy over masks in schools has been wholly conjured by superstitious adults.

If we attribute our political ideologies to our toddlers, we might as well believe in goblins. But we are a nation indivisibly attached to our individual right to our personal perspectives regardless of their relationship with reality. We might believe in ghosts; we might not believe in microbes; we might walk into a business substantially dedicated to selling masks and refuse to wear one for the sake of civility, safety or anything else. But we certainly believe that what we believe is all that matters.

An unparalleled expression of this brand of subjective extremism is captured in journalist Bob Woodward’s newly released recordings of his interviews with then-President Donald Trump. In the dire early stages of the pandemic, months after his top advisers told Trump the virus would be the greatest threat to national security of his administration, he denies any duty to deal with the crisis not just to the reporter but also to his own son, almost as if the bodies piling up around them were phantasms.

It’s in the shadow of such leadership that Halloween is just a prelude to a scarier mid-autumn observance, Election Day. Unlike the last two Halloweens, this one falls amid our great national unmasking and, as it turns out, un-vaxxing.

President Joe Biden got his latest coronavirus booster shot before the cameras Tuesday and pleaded with the public to follow suit. Nearly two months after a vaccine adapted for the latest coronavirus variants was made available, only about 7% of eligible Americans have received one.

“Nearly every death is preventable, so ... get your updated COVID shot,” Biden said. “Now’s the time to do it, by Halloween if you can.”

Biden is no Trump: His predecessor refused to get his vaccination in public and cultivated COVID denialism to the extent that his own supporters once greeted his admission that he got a booster with boos (not the Halloween kind). But most politicians are vulnerable to the impulse to tell the public what they want to believe, and Biden is no exception. Last month, he preposterously declared the pandemic “over,” noting as his evidence that “no one is wearing masks” and “everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.”

To his credit, Biden recently extended the federal COVID emergency through the holidays. About the same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom extended California’s emergency declaration into February but also promised that it would end then, noting for good measure that “throughout the pandemic, we’ve been guided by the science and data.”

The right has devoted reams of disingenuous rhetoric to demanding that official emergencies end, and Newsom’s relatively cautious approach helped keep Californians safer than the miserable national average. But the governor only undermines his credibility by suggesting that rather than respond to the latest science and data, he can somehow schedule the end of the emergency four months hence.

Sure, the data is far less foreboding than it once was, but not everyone is in pretty good shape. We’re still losing over 350 Americans a day, more than a tenth of them Californians, to COVID. Researchers in Southern California recently uncovered a dramatic increase in heart attacks among young adults since the beginning of the pandemic, which is frightening in more than the seasonally appropriate sense. And experts expect that we’re on the cusp of a winter resurgence of infections by COVID variants as well as other airborne pathogens, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V.

That’s partly because we have enthusiastically ditched the pandemic precautions that helped reduce flu fatalities, for example, to a tiny fraction of the typical annual toll. It’s why masks are regularly encouraged and accepted at risky times and places to prevent respiratory infections in other parts of the world. Don’t try it here, though — at least not unless you’re offering candy.

This story was originally published October 30, 2022 at 7:00 AM.