Talk about the efficacy of face masks is reverberating throughout the country right now, mostly talk about how well various materials filter out viral particles.
I’d like to offer a different argument for face masks, one not used nearly often enough in official conversations: Masks keep hands away from noses, lips, and mouths. I was out with a nurse friend in a bakery awhile back* when she pointed out to me that I was using my hands as I talked and putting them on or near my face.
“Don’t do that!” she said fiercely. “Not now. Not with COVID.”
I frequently do “that,” however — and so do many other teachers I know. Teachers often talk with their hands. Those flourishes in front of the whiteboard come naturally after awhile. A more vivacious, animated teacher has an easier time holding her classes’ attention. I point. I wave my arms. And I also crook my index finger and rub my lips while I think. Sometimes I stroke my chin while making a decision.
What I have realized and want to share is that I stop those unsafe behaviors when my mask is on. When my face is covered, my hands don’t go near my face. With my mouth and nose inaccessible, my hands find other things to do.
This change in a lifetime of natural behavior strikes me as an argument for finding the most comfortable, effective mask(s) possible and keeping them on throughout the day. I would suggest any readers who are face-touchers especially should stay inside their masks until they leave work, except for lunch and other necessary breaks. Even if the class has gone to gym or art, germs are still in the air and may be on surfaces. While you are working alone, it’s worth thinking about air flow in small, converted closet spaces. So many schools have converted closets and storage rooms into active work areas. Copy machines and laminators turn up in the strangest of places. Any ventilation and maybe cleaning in repurposed spaces will likely be haphazard at best.
Comfort is key here. Comfort is also extremely individual, while masks are unfortunately mass-produced. Because of the lack of careful sizing, we can expect to see many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip in our masks.
We might as well let this kid wear a snorkel. It would work as well and he might have more fun.
That’s part of our problem in classrooms. A mask that fits an adolescent doesn’t fit a kindergartener. Even with mask mandates, certain adults and children are running around in face coverings that are more theoretical than real.
Below is an example of a tip I got from an MD friend. She staples her masks to make them shorter along the side. This prevents gapping for shorter-faced persons. This mask has a wire so I can fit it to my nose. It covers my whole lower face and chin easily. Longer face persons may need to discard or share a few masks within the family, those masks that simply don’t cover enough face.
Eduhonesty: This post was inspired by my habit of stripping off that mask as soon as I am out of a crowd or store, along with a family habit of automatically putting hands on faces throughout the day. Especially before Delta took off, many of us were becoming casual about masks. I wasn’t paying enough attention while eating my croissant at that bakery table. It’s easy to fall back into old habits while in conversation or contemplation. So I thought I’d share this cautionary note about keeping masks on until the school day has actually ended.
*My RN friend won’t sit inside that bakery now. The Delta strain has pushed her back to taking outdoor walks and using double masks.
Your face, your choice! Except when trapped in a classroom or a closed space with others.
Feeling shaky about taking off that mask, reader? While I seriously hope the Delta variant does not undo our newfound freedom, the fact is America has been masking up again after a brief period of exposed faces. The WHO has come out to say that students and teachers can go unmasked if everyone has been vaccinated, but now Delta is rewriting rules in the middle of this game and, more crucially, do you trust everyone around you to be vaccinated?
“Everyone” is the key word in the above sentence.
I easily find a number of solid arguments for masking up. Yes, the classrooms are often underventilated and social distancing in those rooms can be impossible. Kids are also haphazard about personal hygiene — they wipe snot on their masks and sleeves all the time. A look under desks can reveal whole booger cities. Meanwhile many more kids appear to be getting sick lately.
But here’s the main reason why I am wearing my mask in closed spaces:I won’t take people’s word for their vaccination status. I wish I could but…
From a study by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, The Truth About Lying | Psychology Today: “Lying might be considered endemic in our culture nowadays. Both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one.”
People lie frequently — not always and not invariably, but often enough. People rewrite inconvenient truths to make their lives easier. I remain slightly shaken that my very likeable and competent massage therapist lied to me about his vaccination status. He told me he was vaccinated. A few months later, apparently having forgotten his original statement, he shared the experience of his just-accomplished first vaccination.
Eduhonesty: Mask up, teacher reader, and everyone else out there who has to be in groups and crowds. It’s just a mask. But that and the vaccination are the main tools in the toolbox for ducking COVID right now.
In particular, trusting vaccination promises made by people who don’t want to wear masks is like believing the “I never got the email” line. Maybe that piece of email did actually get lost in the spam folder, but I remember an earlier time when “the check is in the mail” filled the same function — getting out of trouble. “Car trouble” and “my alarm didn’t go off” made frequent appearances as well.
Who is behind the maskless face? We all wear masks, covered faces or no.
1) To steer clear of consequences; this one’s the biggest reason for the Lie, I suspect. Liars don’t have to wear a mask indoors. No one will demand they take regular COVID tests as a condition of their employment. Plus massage clients will keep booking hours with them. Etc.
2) To avoid feeling awkward; they don’t have to explain why they have not gotten that shot. The vaccinated will take their masks off, thinking the liars are unlikely to be a source of contagion, whether that’s true or not. Liars in this category may not plan to get anyone sick, but they obviously are not greatly concerned one way or another.
3) To fit in with the crowd; if everyone in the English department except Joe has gotten their shot, Joe gets to avoid explaining his position and can join in the group camaraderie without questions.
4) To get ahead; Joe can also look like a team player even if he is not.
5) The lies get caught in a web and feel out of control. Once liars first tell people they are vaccinated, they can’t say anything else without risking being caught.
6) Lying gives liars a sense of control over you or their situation. This is the “They can’t make me!” argument. It’s the, “she’s just a sheeple but I need her to sign my paperwork” argument.
Obviously, these reasons for lying overlap often. Avoiding consequences may be all about fitting in and getting ahead for one person, for example. Exact numbers will vary from study to study, depending on participants, how we define lying and other factors. But it’s not a big leap from Joe saying, “I love your Google Slides” (not true) or “Great haircut!” (SO not true) to Joe saying, “Oh, yeah. I got jabbed last March.” It’s not a big leap. Not for many of today’s Joes anyway.
Mask up. Because you can trust most people to do the right thing, but all it takes is one COVIDIOT to shut down the whole kindergarten because they decided to send their sick kid to school — one COVIDIOT to get family after family sick when they lie about their kid’s headache and fever. And all it takes is one Joe to compromise the whole teacher’s lounge.
Parents and teachers should reflect on that sad truth as we go about day-to-day business during the upcoming school year. I offer this as one more solid reason to keep the masks on, I hope for not much longer. ________________________________________________________________________
A snapshot of our ripped political quilt: Fortunately, many locations are demanding proof of vaccination from teachers and/or students but this is still the COVID Wild West in terms of who is running the show. See: Some states move to block Covid-19 vaccine requirements in public schools – CNN Teachers and parents in California are safer than their counterparts in Alabama, for example.
Readers, please share with friends and others. I have seen many mask articles, but none that tackles this single issue: In today’s emotionally-loaded time, the easiest answer to “Have you been vaccinated?” may be “Yes!” Any parent or teacher knows from experience that the easiest answer doesn’t have to be the true answer. Answering “yes” to the vaccination question has become extremely convenient and as convenience goes up, I fully expect truth-telling will go down.
We are living in a time of monsters, doing battle with wily viruses and putting up kaiju* tracking stations. But tracking does not help when defenses are not erected. The maps are bleeding red, especially in the South, and many people are hardly blinking as county after county goes down. COVID exhaustion is setting in for portions of the population, especially the vaccinated who figure they are safe. Many vaccinated Americans have decided the unvaccinated are not their problem, except for the risk of contagion they may pose.
An M.D. friend of mine recently shared a strategy for outreach that she thought might work to cut through vaccine hesitancy. Forget about oxygen levels, coughs and fever. She wanted to go straight for the test results that might cut through that Tucker-Carlson-glaze of irreality: sexual dysfunction. The evidence is mounting that COVID-19 can cause erectile dysfunction and even possible infertility (SARS-CoV-2 and Male Infertility: Possible Multifaceted Pathology – PubMed (nih.gov)).
For an unfortunate group of COVID-19 sufferers, one manifestation of COVID-19 is hyperinflammation, along with blood clots, little clots and sometimes bigger clots. Tony-nominated Broadway star Nick Cordero died more than 90 days after contracting the coronavirus, essentially from lung damage and clot consequences. His body had long since defeated the virus, but it could not undo the damage the virus had done.
What does this have to do with sexual dysfunction? “Researchers are piecing together that surviving COVID-19 may be associated with erectile dysfunction (ED), the inability to achieve and sustain an erection for purposes of sexual intercourse. The research points to three factors that can lead to the potential onset of ED in men who have had the virus:” (Yes, COVID-19 Can Cause Erectile Dysfunction – Cleveland Clinic)
Vascular effects. Erectile function is a both a predictor of and a consequence of heart disease. One hallmark of COVID-19 has been its ability to cause hyperinflammation throughout the body, “especially in the heart and surrounding muscles. Blood supply to the penis can become blocked or narrowed as a result of a new or worsened vascular condition caused by the virus.”
Psychological impact.
Overall health deterioration. ED is typically a symptom of another underlying problem, frequently a vascular problem.
Maybe my M.D. friend is right. A lot of so-called tough guys are wandering through short TV segments explaining that they trust their natural immune system to fight off the virus. Unfortunately, that strategy has turned into a literally ultimate epic fail for many young and hearty middle-aged men who will never be old men. Others are getting lung transplants or slowly wandering around their houses lugging oxygen equipment. That guy with the oxygen tank? He’s not having sex, not any version that most of us would recognize anyway.
Let’s add a fact a lot of us know from having grown older: The things we thought we escaped from when young sometimes come back to bite us. A familiar argument of this nature relates to smoking: People who quit smoking decrease their risk of smoking-related illnesses, but the past does not simply vanish. Yes, people should quit but quitting does not erase the past. Not entirely.
Here are the results of a sobering study related to smoking: “Conclusion: There is a strong association between the intensity of cigarette smoking and degree of ED. Stopping cigarette smoking can improve ED in a considerable proportion of smokers. Age and the severity of ED before stopping are inversely related to the chance of improvement.” (Do cigarette smokers with erectile dysfunction benefit from stopping?: a prospective study – PubMed (nih.gov))
Eduhonesty: Readers may be asking, why all this smoking data? What do cigarettes and kaiju have to do with vaccine hesitancy?
The smoking data is great support for an argument that might help convince some men to get vaccinated. The biggest enemy of a solid erection is a damaged circulatory system. In doing research on this topic, I even came across one article where the author suggested that difficulty getting an erection could possibly be used diagnostically as an indicator of possible COVID-19 cardiovascular damage. I also found another study worth sharing that said upfront, “Erectile dysfunction (ED), as the hallmark of endothelial dysfunction, could be a short- or long-term complication of COVID-19. Additionally, “subjects with ED could potentially have a higher risk of contracting COVID-19.” (“Mask up to keep it up”: Preliminary evidence of the association between erectile dysfunction and COVID-19. – Abstract – Europe PMC)
I grant the study itself is a rather technical and wordy read. I’d focus on that ED “could be a long-term complication of COVID-19.” Also, the data suggests people who already have ED may have increased risk of getting COVID-19.
Let’s journey into a little speculative paranoia. The “Mask Up” article doesn’t say definitively that people with ED have a higher risk of getting COVID-19, only that logically the data supports the possibility. But here’s the Godzilla hiding below our sea of overflowing ICUs, the giant creature from the deeps that we should not ignore: That data’s not truly in yet. This monster could be sneaking up on us even now. The shadows are there. Studies show the virus in testicular tissue. Multiple reports of ED after COVID-19 are beginning to come in. The fact that this virus can blast blood vessels is well established.
Godzilla is in this post simply because some anti-vaxxers appear to be living in a monster movie, one where the evil 5G Nanobot kaiju is coming to eat their DNA. The vaccine hesitant often have some unreal or at least unsupported ideas as well. If we want to approach this time as a monster movie, I have a monster of my own to cast in my film: We’ll call him Erectile Dysfunction. I’ll bet that some of the anti-vax crowd will find my monster even scarier than the 5G Nanobot.
Our systems have been overwhelmed since early 2020. Research into erectile dysfunction is in its earliest stages. It’s happening now, but a great deal of more immediate research had to happen first. The ability to get an erection doesn’t rate much strategy-time when weighed against the need to supply oxygen to people on the edge of death. It doesn’t hit the radar when trying to pull people back from that edge before they enter the transplant zone.
Godzilla returned to the sea but Tokyo did not just revert to an earlier version of itself. I think my friend is right, too. Many men who are not worried about their lungs or heart will take the possibility of long-term erectile dysfunction seriously because those big, technical words in research articles convey a simple idea — maybe the only kaiju that will rescue some of today’s vaccine hesitant once they catch COVID-19 is Viagra, and Viagra doesn’t work for everybody.
Common Viagra side effects include flushing; headache, dizziness, abnormal vision (blurred vision, changes in color vision), runny or stuffy nose, nosebleeds, sleep problems, muscle pain, back pain, or upset stomach. Users are told not to use this drug with nitrates, and to report severe dizziness, sudden loss of vision, and sudden hearing loss or ringing in the ears to their doctor immediately. Do the vaccine hesitant really want to become reliant on this drug? Viagra may be a port in the storm, but it’s no port I’d choose to visit unless I’d run out of alternatives.
Some things, once broken, can be hard or even impossible to fix. The unluckiest polio victims never walked again. Many of the denizens of this planet still have not wrapped their minds around the idea that this disease dose not operate like a toggle switch — it’s not sick or well, not for everybody anyway. (See When I Could No Longer Walk Up the Hill — And Amber Is Still Sick, Six Months Later | Notes from the Educational Trenches (eduhonesty.com)) Long haulers are real and nobody wants to haul this particular disability around through life. Among the many things masks and vaccinations may prevent: the need to cruise the Walgreen’s drive-up lane to pick up the latest Viagra refill.
Thanks for reading this slightly off-topic post. Masking and vaccinations will keep our students and teachers safer. Readers, please keep trying to reach across the philosophical divide that has developed around vaccinations. We can’t prevent massive misinformation from being shared across the internet, but we can keep supplying facts.
*Word for the day: kaiju [ˈkīˌjo͞o] — a giant monster especially featured in Japanese fantasy and science fiction movies and T.V. programs.
P.S.S. Studies can be found related to women’s sexual health and COVID-19 but these remain thin on the ground and frequently relate to the effects of quarantining and sheltering rather than direct illness. To be continued…
Hugs, readers. I hope the summer is giving you a chance to relax and regroup. Jocelyn Turner
There’s a rather fascinating “let-them-die” sentiment floating around out here. “They” deserve more compassion than they are receiving in my view. The internet is a hot, steaming mess of crazy ideas right now, not remotely based in science.
People believe in the 5G, nanobot mind control crisis or the pretty-sure-it-will-kill-us-in-a-few-years-because-there’s-DNA-in-it and it’s-rewriting-our-genetic code stuff. Sorting through facts, factoids and outright lies can be a tough proposition for the science-lite. Somehow — and we absolutely must figure out where U.S. education went so wrong — the US is filled with science-lite adults who don’t have the slightest idea how 5G or DNA works. But let’s be clear: Many monster whoppers and pure lies are populating cyberspace right now. Media stars with enough followers to fill a small city post stories they have never checked for accuracy and suddenly hundreds of thousands of lies are getting reposted and retweeted across the universe. How COVID-19 infected the world with lies – CNET
Politics isn’t helping us at all. Florida’s governor DeSantis has been championing the right not to wear a mask even as conventions cancel their Florida bookings and friends of mine decide to vacation in the North instead. “Florida has the country’s highest hospitalization rate and second-highest rate of recent cases, behind Louisiana. Infection levels have been rising in every state, with especially alarming rates in the South. Many of those governors have also been reluctant to impose new restrictions or require masks.” (A COVID Surge in Florida Challenges Gov. Ron DeSantis, Again (yahoo.com))
Almost all of America’s children may be masking up for the next school year. As it stands, “CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky urged all schools reopen to in-person learning in the fall, but with proper safety protocols — and that now includes masks.
Eduhonesty: It’s a tiny little mask, not a fifty pound backpack. Unless you have COPD or a serious lung disease, that mask is no big deal. I did a stress test while wearing two masks. I didn’t keel over. In fact, I passed my test just fine.
Here is my suggestion as we go through August. As we post the pictures of our paintings, kitties, puppies and delicious lunches, let’s make it a point to sometimes post the story that explains why children should be wearing those masks. Post the story of the Florida dad who thought he’d be fine because he was a former athlete, the dad sitting in his window with oxygen tubes running out his nose after he spent two weeks in the COVID ICU because his elementary age child brought the microbe home and gave it to the whole family. Vaccinated mom had the equivalent of a cold. The kids recovered quickly. Dad has not been so lucky. Weeks later, he still needs supplemental oxygen just to manage light daily activities.
Post those stories. Yes, many of us are vaccinated and have effectively moved on, tired of endless COVID stories, especially now that only one or two out of 100 COVID deaths are occurring in the vaccinated. But not all of us are living in entirely stratified COVID bubbles. Readers, we have to make sure the information flow doesn’t revert back entirely to puppies and vacation photos. Our science-lite friends need us.
Let’s help the schools to help the parents to help the kids mask up.
Parents who are dubious about masks, here is my simple argument. That mask may work. The evidence strongly suggests it does if you read far enough and long enough. That mask does no harm to a healthy kid. (I acknowledge special cases such as autism.) If the mask is useless (it’s not), still, having your child wear the mask will do no harm. If the mask is useful, you may save your family or others an incredible amount of misery.
As to the civil liberties argument: There are hills worth dying on. This for damn sure is not one of them. We are talking about a thin facial covering versus disease and even death. Please. The idea that we should even balance one against the other sounds … stunningly out of touch with our common humanity. The fact that I can drive though the crosswalk and probably everyone will be able to leap out my way in time to escape serious injury does not mean I should barrel through the crosswalk.
Please, readers, let’s keep the flow of accurate information on COVID going out to our various feeds.
Questions to share with social media friends:
Did you check Snopes?
Have you cross-checked that story?
Why do you believe Fred when most everyone else says something else?
I’ll confess I haven’t always checked out my sources as much as I should in this life. Right now, though, we should all be holding each other accountable. Because we have a long way to go and a short time to get there before the next school year begins.
