Covid's Winter Spread Means It Is Time For Us To Mask Up

I wouldn’t want to make what is turning out to be an unusually miserable January even worse, but I feel bound to remind you that, well, Covid isn’t over.

- SEAN O'GRADY

This week, the Spanish health department reimposed mandatory mask-wearing in hospitals and health centres. They have not done this because of some spontaneous tyrannical tic, but because there’s been a surge in respiratory illnesses of all kinds – flu (which we know is more dangerous than we like to think), RSV, the common cold, and the various variants of the coronavirus. It’s a common-sense, precautionary step that will probably slow the spread of the disease, especially among more vulnerable folk, ie the ones who tend to spend time in hospitals.

It’s predictably provoked a hysterical response from the antimask mob, but really it is not much to ask as a very soft condition of service: “We are talking about putting on a mask when you enter a health centre and taking it off when you leave. I don’t think it is any drama. It is a basic and simple measure of the first order,” says the Spanish health minister, Monica Garcia. Quite right, too. As an imposition, of sorts, it is proportional and trivial, and even if many masks aren’t 100 per cent effective, it might well help someone avoid serious illness, or worse.