It's time to retire the outdoor-masking charade, or at least admit it's a religious fixation

An endlessly politicized pandemic reveals the difference between people's real and displayed values

Worldwide, scientists have not documented any instances of outdoor transmission unless people were in close conversation.

The New York Times published that sentence on February 12 concerning COVID-19. It casually appeared in the second section of a piece by David Leonhardt about people’s tendency to confront novel biological hazards with near-infinite levels of caution. Leonhardt touches on the downsides of “COVID absolutism” and similarly oversized “better-safe-than-sorry” phenomena, but doesn’t mention that his own newspaper is responsible for a great deal of the exaggerated fears about the transmission of the virus foisted on the public throughout all of last year. The essay links to a few stories about idiotic administrators like the ones at—really, where else?—U.C.-Berkeley, who banned running even with masks on and essentially put the student body under house arrest.

I think it’s worth stressing again: Worldwide, scientists have not documented any instances of outdoor transmission unless people were in close conversation.

Note that “in close conversation” doesn’t mean one person yelling “Put a mask on, asshole!” and another responding “[Impossible action], [not-for-kids epithet]!” as the two pass each other on, say, the Bear Creek Path with a combined relative velocity of 15 or so miles per hour, at a distance of six feet. Or three. In fact, transmission in such a medium requires at least a few minutes, and probably as close to an utter absence of sunlight, moisture and wind as physically possible.

This is something people—especially runners—should be not only emphasizing to everyone around them, but celebrating with great cries of relief. It obviously means you can’t catch or transmit the virus if you’re out running (at least by yourself) no matter how many people, masked or otherwise, you pass along the way.

This only makes sense; COVID-19 is a new kind of virus, but it’s not a new entity. Virions are tiny, tiny particles, incalculably smaller than a dust mote, that obey the laws of physics and no more have the capacity to behave supernaturally than anything else. Even the deadliest human fighter on the planet will die without oxygen after several minutes, and within moments if exposed to high doses of hydrogen cyanide. And any wind strong enough to carry virions a considerable distance will destroy them, if sunlight and the molecules that make up air don’t do so first.

But even if you can still picture a magical array of diabolical particles traveling intact through five, ten or twenty feet in the air and zipping down into your unfortunate lungs, it’s now been a year since the pandemic started, and a lot of people have been doing a lot of semi-intimate stuff outdoors other than running. That adds up to countless millions of individual transient interactions around the world, between runners, walkers, protesters, and probably no small number of skulking adulterers. So if that supernatural physical-biochemical development had in fact transpired, we* would know it by now. We’d* have known it many long months ago. Bodies would be piled six deep in the street, scheduled for pickup every Friday (probably by Amazon) with the coffee grounds and properly disposed-of feminine napkins.

All sane theoretical arguments in this area have been exhausted.

No known cases.

Even the more COVID-cautious people I talk to in other parts of the country seem at least hazily aware of the lack of real danger of catching the disease outside, and are just waiting for new weekly cases to diminish to a point where the silly nationwide outdoor-masking charade can end. Perhaps things can return to a status quo that doesn’t involve people using wide-open paths with their whole heads swaddled in cloth, with our without darting far out of the way of anyone approaching them at a trot, their fearful expressions sometimes suggesting anticipation of an actual attacker.

But the longer this needless conduct continues—as it’s doing unabated in Boulder, the happiest bitchy city in the world, with a highly educated citizenry—the more normative it becomes, and the less enjoyable it is for everyone, including the dutifully compliant, to share public spaces with others. At least four in every five people I see walking or running around here has a mask on even before they come into view, and an additional fraction put theirs on when they see me (and presumably, other joggers as well) coming. I don’t think the prevalence among runners is significantly lower than that of walkers, and almost all cyclists wear them. And as I will get to, the exclamation point on this being no more than a nonsensical yet widely expected form of role-playing is the slate of overtly dangerous behaviors on the local paths that innumerable idiots—many among the persistently masked—have been perpetrating for years without consequence.

By the way, must I explain why running with a mask on sucks? If it were a no-cost measure to make oldsters and others feel safer, I might be on board, but even then I would prefer that people escape the shackles of their own misinformation. And yeah, most anyone could get used to breathing in and out through a mesh or cloth surface and listening to the equivalent of Darth Vader masturbating under the same wool blanket as you for an hour straight. But I see a lot of runners who are “used to” a variety of accessories and distractions I couldn't tolerate on the go, such as pushing strollers, conducting phone calls, wearing huge fanny packs, smoking the demon-weed, etc.

Nothing about Leonhardt’s observation is new; the basics about the virtual impossibility of getting or transmitting the virus while in motion outdoors have been available from the start. But in large parts of the U.S. and certainly around here, the realities, some of them intuitively obvious even to children, have been continually ignored in favor of maintaining tribal behavior. On my local splotch of Nextdoor, which should be put out of the city’s and the Internet’s misery, the pandemic has offered substrate for liberal-vs.-conservative proxy-wars, and given the constitutionally bossy as well as paranoid older people reason to continually berate everyone not conforming to their level of citizen responsibility.

Before I get to that, I’ll assume against all reason that I haven’t completely weeded out the crazies and the haters with my farrago of intrusive facts in recent months, and that a few skeptics (that is, people skeptical of the claim of an infinitesimally small outdoor risk) are reading this; if so, I will invite those readers to look at this from my perspective.

Have you ever laughed at an educated, presumably non-impaired adult for buying into and spreading an absolute absurdity as gospel truth? Like, say, a guy with an engineering degree who not only thinks his dead great-uncle is haunting his house, but belittles people with the temerity to accept more mundane explanations for his occasionally creaky floorboards?

If you’re masking up to go running, that educated adult is you now. You’re part of spreading and maintaining misinformation, and a lot of needless misery, either because you honestly believe you might catch or spread a viral illness out there or because you believe it is better to placate those who do.

But you’re not getting widely laughed at, because you’re not crazy (at least not for wearing the mask; it’s probable you also believe something banal and incorrect about both human nutrition and the value of stretching in a particular kind of pants). This is because when enough people buy into the same delusion, it’s no longer a delusion. It’s a religion. (That’s only if those people are doing any real thinking at all, even if it’s poor thinking. Otherwise, it’s more of a cult.)

As vexatious as I find this issue, I’m not coming at it from a place of "Why don’t people get it?” I understand why people are doing what they have chosen to do and that it comes mostly from genuine, if misguided, concern. Nothing like this has ever happened before to most of us; we live in tumultuous but, on a grander and understandable scale, remarkably complacent times. People’s lives are a mess. Those who were charged with offering answers and comity instead checked out, lied for effect or were too craven to say what they really believed. A mirror for our times.

Still, that’s what makes the Leonhardt editorial so ironic: Again, his paper was one of the main outlets pushing the COVID-19 fear factor all of last year. They sucked everyone in by making the direct disease coverage free, but now all of the meta-coverage is behind a paywall, which is a plus because it helps limits the spread of The New York Times. And by “fear factor” I don’t just mean the real, scary-enough statistics, but pieces along the lines of “While no cases have been confirmed to have spread by mechanism X, experts nevertheless caution that…”

And at least partly as a result, there are a lot of folks behaving like searing bungholes around here—people whose mouths I envision in the form of salon-caliber hairdryers protruding from anuses and blasting the metabolites of multiple burritos outward in a neat, toxic cone—and I must address them and their influence.

(Note: For those who prefer to graze rather than binge on my over-fattened words, this is a natural stopping point. I was going to split this into two posts, but then thought, “Would I want to be tortured by that level of suspense for a full day?”)

Since the end of last April or so, Boulder has been under a public-health order requiring the wearing of masks outdoors when a distance of 6’ from others can’t be maintained. This might not have been terribly problematic on its own if the city hadn’t screwed up the signs to make it appear as if masks outdoors were mandatory, period.

This cleverly leaves out the “if you can’t maintain a distance of six feet” part of the health order, although in the end I’m not sure how much of a difference this would have made. (At the time, the city was also enthusiastically putting up hundreds of 20 MPH signs to commemorate a new citywide speed limit for people to predictably ignore. This in a driving environment now consisting of 85 percent delivery vehicles? As usual, great comic timing here.)

These two screen shots are representative of any of a dozen or so threads I’ve seen on Nextdoor about outdoor mask use.

I’d like to portray this as the usual “Small number of people making most of the noise,” but to the extent this is true, the bitching is still pretty well distributed among what appears to be a fair share of posters, and this is supported by the level of masking—and occasional fraught variations on finger-waggling in my direction—on the paths and streets where I run.

But while we can debate just how much tolerance society should have for people like me who introduce not any real risk but a brand of dissidence with our bare-faced running, a five-minute study of the general behavior of everyone using the local streets and rec paths reveals almost all of the panic to be an easy claiming of moral high ground, with little apparent downside, like the Black Lives Matter signs peppering many of the area yards.

In my experience, the people most ardent about imposing ad hoc rules on others care far more about being priests than about being helpful members of any community. These types care only about the rule itself, not whatever dire consequences they’re yammering about. In the places I see them operating, they leave distinguished posting records of celebrating both every new restrictive municipal ordinance and the grief of anyone with the temerity to disagree in any way with its conceptualization or administration. The net result is to further confuse any already ignorant readers or listeners while putting off people who, on principle, dislike any combination of officious capering and baseless preaching about health apocalypses.

The epidemiological facts, and the ease with which smiling, educated people should be able to access them, should be enough for me to make this kind of case. But as I noted, the overall level of objectively inconsiderate behavior on the local paths hasn’t changed at all during the pandemic. And the fact that no Nextdoorians are complaining about these very real, longstanding hazards calls into question how much they really care about the safety of other people, broadly speaking, in shared spaces.

What hazards? They’re not unique to Boulder. People still walk two and three abreast on ten-foot-wide paths and—because they’re too entitled to fall into a single-file line for even three seconds of whatever conversation is afoot lest a single syllable be lost in the breeze—expect those coming in the other direction to move six feet outward from the most medial moron of the bunch. Loads of people on foot and bikes zoom around well after dark with little or no illumination. Skateboard users remain a class of humans no one would miss if every single one of them scrambled aboard one of Elon Musk’s less-well-contrived space machines and was removed from the gene pool in a cataclysmic, YouTube-ready fireball of flannel, sideburns, and sulk. And I suppose I could write a separate post about all of the abandoned dog manure in the parks (I’ve lived among worse offenders, but remember, we’re all perfect people here) and folks with insufficient control over their children as well as their pets, but now I’m just getting into the ordinary ways people are not perfect. I would rather see a kid wobbling around the entire width of a path on a bike with his mom lagging behind than imagine the same kid cooped inside with no opportunities. (My mother following me as I learned to ride a bike at age 5 or so remains one of the more exhilarating early-childhood memories.)

So for whose benefit, exactly, am I supposed to add a continually worn face-mask to my (well-lit, when necessary) jogger’s ensemble? What is the value of performative art when the whole structure on which it’s being painted, or sharted, has a bunch of broken windows and a missing front door?

Obviously, I’m not functionally impeded by anyone else’s bluster or mistaken beliefs; at this stage, they’re a nuisance, and because I’m a charmer up close actual confrontations have been limited to a few run-ins with the kinds of joyful pilgrims who hate the hell out of everything that moves, mostly themselves. So why do I care enough to spend another 3,000 words (oh, but sometimes they flow so quickly!) on the subject?

One, because I’m selfless only to a point. I have a humdrum life, yet one I look forward to enjoying every day I can get outdoors. This is vital and costs me and everyone else nothing. This has always been the case, but I am also someone who has gone from being an infrequent socializer to a near-hermit glued to either a PC or musical keyboard, and I like my runs—and what little contact with people I have on these excursions—to be pleasant experiences for all concerned. And because I almost always run with a dog, and also because I have always been able to detect the stench of toe-jam, armpits, thighpits, and unwashed ass from a considerable distance, me giving people at least a six-foot berth is nothing new. I’m never in a hurry anymore, so I’m happy to step off the path and let someone with two unruly dogs by. And I keep a bandana on mostly as a fashion accessory, but also in case I need to suddenly go inside a building with my dog. (This did happen at a private residence recently after a circus of minor misadventures on a subzero day, but the homeowner’s cats were okay with it and the guy himself didn’t care about masks at all. He probably just thought I was a fool for being out there, and I was.)

But I find it vexing to not be able to read people’s expressions. When I had a therapist, I asked her, “Doesn’t it damage human relations in general when facial expressions are nixed from the mix?” (though not that adroitly), and she described to me at some length how this occurs and depends on individually held beliefs (a lot of mine are somewhat suspicious nowadays). When I step off the path rather than don my mask to pass someone wearing one, I don’t demand a show of gratitude, but I am used to being able to read people’s emotions from whatever lines and creases appear on their faces. As a cynic, it helps me a lot to know that my doing my no-mask-but-stepping-aside thing is, if not appreciated in the fullest sense, at least reassuring. And while you’d never know it, but I am among the most cheerful runners alive—ask anyone who only sees me at my best. Why wouldn’t I be? I haven’t had a bad race in years and have no expectations of similar setbacks in the future, and I have no injuries at the moment.

And two, because this mask charade is a fading aspect of a political proxy war. Although the Nextdoor mask-chatter has largely died down since the November elections, Boulder’s rec-paths mask rate is a direct projection of its hyperpartisan lean. Boulder County residents cast almost four times as many votes for Joseph R. Biden (the younger one) as they did for Donald J. Trump (the older one), which likely means that here in the city itself, it was even more of a rout—on a scale of nearby Denver, which fielded almost 400,000 votes and went an astonishing 80 to 18 percent for Biden.

Whatever your overall feelings about this result, it comes packaged with an enormous number of people buying into frail mythologies at significant societal and individual cost.

I like being able to see when people are smiling or at least be able to read their faces. I enjoy stopping to greet other people with dogs. Certain people, at least. I’m sure I’m far from the only one who feels this way, but as usual I seem to be in a sharp minority in publicly grousing about how ignorant so many of my neighbors are about basic facts.

But while the mask stuff will go away soon enough, associated mythologies and their influence will not. If you are still confused about why I see lying, slothful poseurs infecting running and the people who cover it, an ostensibly niche concern, as a genuine threat to everyone—including, perhaps most of all, minorities—I recommend digging into John McWhorter’s free (in part, at least), in-progress e-book about the real perils of the Wokish people’s machinations: Preface, Chapter 1, Chapter 2. McWhorter is a Black professor of various subjects at Columbia University and a linguist, so the harpies among ye will have to work very hard to dismiss him as a crotchety old white guy with minimal-to-absent writing skills.