ANALYSIS: How many unvaccinated people will stop wearing masks now?

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Fri, 2021-05-14 11:27 — mike kraft

Analysis | How many unvaccinated people will stop wearing masks now? Polls show a strong majority of those who are refusing the vaccine already feel safe interacting without masks. And there's going to be little to stop them from doing so now. Aaron Blake Washington Post

We’re entering a big new era in the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s one that will strike you the moment you venture into public: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said it no longer recommends that vaccinated people wear masks in most situations, including indoors. Almost immediately, people began shedding the masks that have become ubiquitous in our lives over the past year-plus.

The implementation of this carries some obvious challenges, though, chief among them: Won’t this just free up unvaccinated people to also not wear masks? Even if verifying vaccination status weren’t such a thorny issue (vaccine passports!), it’s completely impractical to do so in everyday public interactions.

The most important thing for the vaccinated to know is that, according to the CDC, they don’t have to worry.

But as with getting vaccinated, it’s not just about you; it’s also about stopping the spread of the virus in the broader society. Freeing up the unverifiable unvaccinated to blend in with their vaccinated neighbors by taking off their masks could allow them to more easily spread the disease among themselves. That could, in turn, make it more difficult to stamp out the virus. People have been talking about this in terms of whether the unvaccinated will simply “lie” about their status, but they won’t really even have to do that; they can just take off their masks.

So how much are they likely to do that?

Polling before the CDC’s decision was announced suggests it’s quite likely that a huge number of them will. And not only that, but unvaccinated people are also more likely to engage in riskier activities, in large part because they don’t take the virus as seriously as those who have sought inoculation.

An Economist/YouGov poll released last week showed that 63 percent of Americans who said they didn’t plan to get vaccinated said they felt at least “somewhat” safe socializing indoors with other unvaccinated people without a mask. That compared with just 36 percent of people who had received at least one dose. In others words, the people who were much more protected were still more reluctant. (It seems likely the latter number will rise in the coming weeks, based on the new CDC guidance).

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The solution seems, as it has been, to make that group of unvaccinated people as small as possible. Ideally, many of those people will see the relaxing of mask mandates as an incentive to get vaccinated to free themselves up. Maybe this will help them see the finish line. But it also boils down to a private decision that their neighbors will likely never know about — to get something many of them already doubt is safe and/or terribly necessary.

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