Recently, I was in a supermarket and, although most people were masked, a surprising number weren’t, including a woman standing near me with what seemed to be her two teen-aged children. I said nothing. But what could I have said?
Here’s what I imagined saying, after I had already left the store. If they allowed me to make my case, I think I would have said that I drove to this store without mishap and I expect return home without mishap. I’m almost 100% sure. I’d tell them that I imagine they’re in the same position as me. They drove to the store safely and expect to return safely, and they’re almost surely right.
Yet, I would point out, we have car insurance, at least liability coverage, because such insurance is required by law. Why does the law compel us to have such insurance if we’re almost sure that we won’t have an accident and become liable to pay for someone else’s injuries? The reason is two-fold. First, there’s the fact of “almost.” We can’t be certain that we won’t have an accident.
Second, we are among more 230 million drivers in the United States, most of whom drive safely on any given day. But with that many drivers and car trips, the long-shot possibility of an accident that injures or kill someone is certain to become a reality many times every day. In 2021, 38,460 people died in car accidents in the US, and 4.4 million were seriously injured.
We still wouldn’t need laws requiring liability coverage if people acted responsibly. Realizing that driving always contains a small risk of being responsible for an accident that injures or kills someone, they would buy liability insurance just to make sure they could cover the costs associated with any such accident. Follow the Golden Rule. None of us would want to be injured without the person responsible paying the medical bills.
Yet, we know that we can’t count on people being so responsible. First, it doesn’t seem necessary, because the chances of such an accident on any given occasion are remote. I’ve been driving for almost 60 years and have never injured, much less killed anyone. Second, most people struggle to pay their bills. Voluntarily buying insurance to cover remote possibilities seems unreasonable compared to paying for groceries, rent, and gas. So, the government requires liability insurance as part of the privilege of driving a car.
The situation with wearing a mask during the Covid-19 epidemic is similar. I assume that the people I saw in the supermarket were quite sure that they didn’t have the disease and were therefore incapable of spreading it while unmasked. They may have all been vaccinated, the mother long enough ago to already have been boosted. Although we know that some people can have the virus without symptoms and still pass it on to others, the chances of people like them having the virus and passing it to someone else while in the supermarket seem remote.
But with more than 330 million people in the US, a possibility that’s remote in each individual case becomes a certainty many times over every day. What’s more, many people in our country aren’t vaccinated. Their illness and tendency to pass the virus to others is still unlikely on any given occasion, but nevertheless more likely than if they were vaccinated. And those who refuse free vaccination may be more likely than the vaccinated to see no reason to wear a mask. More than twelve times as many people died in 2021 of Covid than from car accidents.
But does wearing a mask really help? In case you don’t trust the experts on this issue, there’s been an experiment with all of us as research subjects. The flu is a virus that comes every winter, killing between 12,000 and 60,000 Americans. During 2020/2021 flu season, before there was widespread vaccination for Covid-19, the main way of trying to contain the pandemic was for people to wear masks, social distance, and wash their hands. One result of these precautions was that only 646 people died of the flu virus. Masking helps greatly to reduce the spread of viruses.
In sum, wearing a mask indoors when you’re in public is like car insurance. It protects against remote negative outcomes that are certain to be huge in the country at large if people don’t take irksome precautions. The government’s fundamental job is to protect people. The liability insurance mandate protects people from suffering financial loss in accidents that they didn’t cause, and mask mandates, whether by government or private enterprises (stores, schools, employers, etc.) protect people from the spread of Covid-19.
As with liability insurance requirements, the mask mandate wouldn’t be necessary if people did the right thing on their own. But not enough people do.
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