One-Way Masking Works

Florida, where I’ve spent the winter holidays, is now a severe-looking blackish purple on coronavirus-case-rate maps. I’ll probably get COVID any minute now, because my fellow revelers seem not overly concerned about keeping their excretions to themselves. The other day, one young man turned his head to the side and hocked a loogie into the sand a few feet away from me. Another took a big inhale from the hookah he had brought to the beach, then puffed a cloud of apple-scented lung aerosols into the South Florida sky and, as it happens, into my nostrils as well. Indoors, I am one of the few people who wears a mask at all.

Earlier in the pandemic, this would have terrified me because, as the 2020-era , “my mask protects me too. And wearing a good-quality mask while vaccinated and (which I am) protects me pretty darn well, regardless of what everyone else is doing.