The Brookings City Council had the good sense to pass an ordinance last night requiring masks in public places to tackle the surging spread of coronavirus. Unlike their last meeting, held in the regular city council chamber where dangerously selfish unmasked protestors crowded out and scared away Brookings residents given to social distancing and good sense, last night’s meeting took place in the Swiftel Center, where sensible Brookingsonians had room to lay out facts, science, and civic responsibility:
Sam Smith teaches at SDSU and focuses on scientific literacy, “and the danger of cherry-picking studies just to support your view instead of looking at entirety of the data.”
“Almost unanimously, our health experts nationally, statewide and locally, support measures like this, notwithstanding our home research amateurs here,” Sam Smith said.
“While I understand the appeal to personal responsibility, when you walk into a public space and pass the virus to a family’s grandparent, aunt, uncle, who ends up dying, how are we to hold you responsible for that? Your choices affect others and that’s where personal responsibility ends and public health begins,” Sam Smith said.
Dr. Sarah Smith tried to dispel some myths.
“COVID-19 is much deadlier than the seasonal flu virus,” she said. In the last five years, between 20,000 and 50,000 people in the U.S. die from influenza annually.
“In the last six months alone, we have seen over 180,000 deaths from COVID,” Sarah Smith said.
“Some people think these numbers are inflated, but these deaths are above and beyond the predictable and expected deaths in this country due to cancer, due to heart disease or respiratory failure or sepsis or any other diagnosis,” Sarah Smith said.
For a 65-year-old with influenza, one in 1,200 will die; for a 65-year-old with COVID, “it is one in 33 that can expect to die. These are sobering numbers,” Sarah Smith said.
“I want to make it clear that masks make a difference,” she said. Along with social distancing, tracing and hygiene, “mask wearing can have a huge impact on decreasing transmission.”
Masks work best “when community use is high,” Sarah Smith said.
Using masks is cheap, easy and “very effective at decreasing spread,” she said.
“I’m confident that using masks is a temporary measure and that someday we can resume life as normal,” Sarah Smith said [Jodelle Grenier, “Mask Mandate Passes,” Brookings Register, 2020.09.09].
Meanwhile, at a special school board meeting Monday night, my neighbors in Groton backed away from a sensible mask requirement at indoor school events:
The Groton Area School Board reviewed its newly implemented policy on requiring face coverings at indoor events. Shawn Gengerke was one of those speaking in favor of recommending instead of requiring. The board noted that those attending the volleyball match wore masks at the beginning of the event, but by the end of the event, 95 percent were not wearing masks. Superintendent Joe Schwan said he did not want to go down the road of having the police come in to escort out fans for trespassing; nor was there any good way to enforce the policy. So in the end, the board voted to alter its policy from requiring to wear face masks to recommending to wear face coverings [“masks Now Required, Not Recommended,” Groton Daily Independent, 2020.09.08; clip submitted by reader to Dakota Free Press].
Superintendent Schwan must be aware that his district enforces all sorts of policies at school sports events without calling the police. South Dakota High School Activities Association standards of conduct, which Groton and every other participating school in the state accepts and enforces as requirements, not recommendations, expect that school officials will evict anyone from a game who is drunk, disorderly, or disrespectful. SDHSAA says that, beyond requiring masks, schools should respond to increasing levels of coronavirus by not even letting the general public into games. Superintendent Schwan and his staff would be well within their authority to not permit individuals failing to comply with health codes to enter the building for a sports and to evict from the building spectators who stop obeying those codes.
School administrators who balk at bringing police into the school (hmmm… is Groton joining Black Lives Matter and recognizing that schools should not host armed “resource officers” to indoctrinate children into police-state obedience?) have a much easier option for enforcing mask rules and other basic requirements at school events: invoke student and staff safety and cancel the event. Individuals not wearing masks create a public health hazard. Pause the game, get on the P.A., and announce that spectators must either put on their masks or leave. If spectators don’t comply, coaches stop play, march their teams off the court, forfeit, and go home. No mask, no game.
Brookings is willing to take on the responsibility of a simple yet serious public health intervention. Let’s hope Groton can get back to teaching its kids proper public policy as well.
The option to halt the game is very effective and used in cases of unruly spectators. It applies equally to this instance of non mask wearing. It’s a perfectly appropriate solution.