Masks will save lives, president-elect Joe Biden declares on Twitter just days before he is sworn in as 46th President of the United States. More than 50,000 lives, according to experts, if Americans make an effort to cover their faces in public between now and April.
‘I know masks have become a partisan issue — but it’s a patriotic act,’ Biden explains. And the squabbling among respondents begins at once. There is no scientific evidence to prove that masks work, says one. What about the unmasked migrant caravan making its way this very moment from Honduras and Guatemala towards the Mexican-US border, asks another? It’s just a flu old man, claims a third.
It’s an infuriating conversation, akin to watching an ultra-slow-motion car crash from the comparative safety of my home in Australia. For even as detractors echo the baseless claims fomented by conspiracy theorists and the outgoing US president, infection and death rates in that country soar. What will it take, I wonder, to change these people’s minds? In an era as politically divisive as the one Americans (and Australians, for that matter) are living through, nothing is likely to convince detractors that COVID is an omnipresent threat — except perhaps the only thing with tangible currency in this whole blasted catastrophe: the visceral consequences of the pandemic itself.
I needed no convincing of its peril when I received news just before Christmas that my cousin, aged 46, was in hospital in South Africa with complications resulting from COVID. He died the next day. Suddenly, this disease — from which we on this side of the world had been largely protected by determined leadership and a culture of compliance and a financially resourceful welfare system — had taken a malicious bite from my own extended family. It was a shock for which we were ill prepared, and a body blow for my aunt and uncle, who had lost their older son in a car crash 20 years earlier.
Days later, we heard that my London-based sister had tested positive for the virus. My cousin’s parents were by now COVID-positive too. While my sister gradually recovered and regained her sense of taste and smell, my uncle’s condition worsened; he was admitted to hospital in South Africa where he steadily declined and where, in a harrowing phone-call to my aunt less than two weeks into the New Year, he told her ‘I am dying’.