Scientists may not agree, but wearing masks can have an important social impact
Earlier this week Austria took a striking step in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak when its government announced that people would not be allowed to enter places such as supermarkets without wearing a face mask, to combat the pandemic.
Earlier this week Austria took a striking step in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak when its government announced that people would not be allowed to enter places such as supermarkets without wearing a face mask, to combat the pandemic.
“It’s clear that the wearing of masks will be a big change, but it is necessary to reduce the spread further,” declared Sebastian Kurz, the country’s chancellor, explaining that masks would be distributed for free at shop entrances.
Some might roll their eyes at this — including many scientists. There is disagreement over whether wearing low-quality masks prevents people from inhaling the virus, even if it does reduce the chances of them spreading it by sneezing or coughing.
Austria will only be distributing regular masks to shoppers, not the N95 respirators (which do reduce inhalation risks).
Some United States and European doctors believe mask-wearing is so pointless for those who do not usually face the direct risks medical staff are exposed to that they have urged consumers to donate any masks they have bought to hospitals instead.
Yet I think it would be a mistake to sneer at Austria’s move — for two reasons. First, mask-wearing has one practical personal benefit: it reminds you to avoid touching your face.
This matters, as David Price, an intensive-care doctor at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical Center, explains in a compelling video about his experiences treating Covid-19 patients. I strongly recommend it.
“In the next few months we need to train ourselves not to touch our faces, and tell people that we are taking this seriously,” he explains, noting that since a mask has limited protective powers, a bandana can be just as effective for “training”.
(One of my teenage daughters now wears her favourite scarf on our rare essential outings on to New York’s streets, which both does the trick and boosts her mood enormously.)
The second reason is that mask-wearing is not just about individual psychology or behaviour; it has social implications, too. Scientists sometimes ignore this, since they are trained to rely on statistics and the results of scientific experiments.
But if ever there was a time when culture — and cultural analysis — matters, it is now. This is true, not just in terms of how societies are responding to the coronavirus crisis, but also when it comes to how diseases spread.
Peter Baehr, a Dutch sociologist who studied the emergence of so-called mask culture in Hong Kong during the Sars outbreak in 2003, outlines this well in a recent book.
As Professor Baehr notes, when the outbreak began, masks were initially discussed only in medical terms. But the conversation soon assumed another dynamic, since by wearing masks “people communicated their responsibilities to the social group of which they were members”.
As Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, put it in an opinion column for The New York Times: “Members of a community wear masks not only to fend off disease [in a pandemic]. They wear masks also to show that they want to stick, and cope, together under the bane of contagion.”
This dynamic is now so well entrenched in Asia that, as Gideon Lasco, an anthropologist who has studied mask culture extensively, writes in the social science publication Sapiens: “Cultural values, perceptions of control, social pressure, civic duty, family concerns, self-expression, beliefs about public institutions, and even politics are all wrapped up in the ‘symbolic efficacy’ of face masks.”
Some Europeans and Americans will scoff. Anglo-Saxon culture tends to prize individualism, not the type of collectivism that has often been valued in Asia.
And in a city such as New York, mask-wearing has been such a minority practice that it has almost been associated with a sense of stigma — in recent times especially, since some view it as a sign of sickness.
The point about mass mask-wearing is that this stigma tends to disappear if everyone puts one on. In fact, not wearing a mask is now almost a source of shame in places such as Japan.
And while it might be hard to imagine this becoming the case in the US, nothing should be ruled out, given how quickly the shock of Covid-19 is reshaping our ideas of risk, and leading to a rising appreciation in the west for collectivist values.
Indeed, US President Donald Trump has now indicated that he might embrace the widespread use of masks, once stocks are readily available. Some of his medical advisers would welcome this. I would too.
As Dr Lynteris notes, epidemics should be understood not just as “biological events but also as social processes”, since this “is key to their successful containment”. If rituals or symbols — like masks — help us to realise this, then so much the better.
To put it another way, beating Covid-19 will not just require medical science, but a dose of social science too. FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gillian Tett is chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US, of the Financial Times. She writes weekly columns, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues.