There are people who don’t believe in man-made
climate change.
There are people who don’t wear seatbelts.
There are people who use their phones while
driving.
There are anti-5G campaigners who don’t
understand non-ionising radiation
There are anti-vaxxers who don’t understand
dosage and won’t accept that Andrew Wakefield
was lying.
There are people who believe that the Earth
is flat.
There are people who don’t appreciate that
Tears Of A Clown is the greatest pop song
ever written.
A lot of people are wrong about a lot of things,
and we’re all wrong about some things, but
there’s a new and particularly disturbing
addition to the list of things that a lot
of people are wrong about:
Face masks.
That’s these pieces of cloth which catch
snot and spittle, preventing yours landing
on somebody else and preventing somebody else’s
landing on you.
They’re not particularly comfortable to
wear but they’re hardly the instrument of
torture that some make them out to be.
They don’t affect your oxygen levels.
They make your glasses steam up but that passes
fairly quickly.
They help stop the spread of Covid-19.
Now, there are people who say that they don’t
trust the government.
They’re right. We shouldn't trust the government.
They were slow to react to Covid-19 and sent
mixed messages once they did.
When they said we shouldn’t wear face masks
it wasn’t because they’re not a good idea,
it was because we didn’t have enough for
NHS staff and many of those we had were out
of date.
On the day that government scientists published
guidance saying that shaking hands can spread
the disease our Prime Minister was on television,
delivering a Covid briefing, bragging about
shaking hands ‘with everyone’ at a hospital
which had covid patients, and was still publicly,
proudly shaking hands two days later.
Three weeks later he was confirmed as having
Coronavirus.
We’ll never know how many people he infected
personally, how many people were infected
by people following his lead and how many
families lost loved ones as a result.
But I digress
Wearing face masks isn’t about the government.
Wearing face masks is about the simple fact
that they reduce the chances of you infecting
other people and reduce the chances of other
people infecting you.
It’s that simple.
Please, unless you have a medical reason not
to, wear a mask.
It’s a relatively small inconvenience that
can save lives.
And some of them are pretty snazzy too.
