Day 135: Domino Masks

While a domino mask may keep you safer than an ersatz mask (by concealing your identity from roving mask police while neither suffocating you nor giving you a false sense of security), today's title actually refers to a few more defeated mask rules, which PlagueBlog can only hope will trigger a chain of dominoes leaving only the sane and scientific social distancing rules in their wake. (One can dream.)

Back in May, Japan urged its citizens not to wear masks outdoors in hot weather to avoid heatstroke. Rather than heatstroke, summer weather in the US leads directly to mask rebellion, described in detail in the Washington Post.

Here in Massachusetts, mask rule overreach happens at the city level, but on the other side of the country, the Mercury News describes an even more divisive county-by-county saga of voluntary vs. mandatory mask wearing—one that drove an Orange County official out of her job and led to the reversal of their mask requirement after over a hundred residents complained:

Although she did not provide a reason for her resignation, Quick was receiving heightened security due to threats stemming from her mask order.

Protesters brought a poster with Quick’s photo embellished with a Hitler mustache and swastikas to a previous Board of Supervisors meeting.

Newsweek reports that Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona has declined to order mask wearing in the state, out of an excess of pragmatism:

"There's not a cure for this virus, and there's not a vaccine for this virus," the governor added. "So this virus is something we need to learn to live with, and we need to make sure that we are protecting the most vulnerable in our society."

(Hint: if you're in a grocery store doing your own shopping, you are unlikely to be "the most vulnerable in our society".)

Here in Massachusetts (where cases are up only a fifth of a percentage point), you can plead any unspecified medical condition and probably get out of wearing a mask, but in Singapore it seems you need to plead multiple personality disorder to escape the swinging cane of justice.