FUREY: Enough with the panic – lifting of mask mandates has gone just fine

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The way British Columbia ended their mask mandate was the best. It was a Thursday morning a couple of weeks ago and they announced that the mandate would end the very next day – in fact, a minute beyond midnight that very evening.

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It didn’t give people a lot of time to react and certainly no time to lobby for its reversal. The band-aid was ripped off real quick.

Here in Ontario it was unfortunately different. We had almost two weeks’ notice before the lifting of the mandate, which finally happened last Monday.

There was a lot of drama in those intervening days, as we awaited the day, and a lot of futile attempts to get the lifting of the mandate overturned.

The theatrical hot takes from that special subset of vocal doctors on social media went into overdrive. They were insistent the sky would fall once the mandate was lifted. I could name names, but quite frankly their time in the spotlight is over and we shouldn’t give them any more of the attention they crave.

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We had “experts” tearing their hair out as if Ontario was the first and only jurisdiction to venture into the unknown territory of optional masking, when in truth we were one of the last holdouts.

Almost every single US state had already done it and they weren’t any worse off because of it. It was quite the error of omission that hardly any news articles referenced this fact. Instead, they reported on mask rules as if Ontario existed in a vacuum.

Despite all that noise, the lifting of the mandate has come to be a relatively mutated affair. Depending on where you live in the province and depending on the location and activity in question, there are still a lot of people wearing masks. In fact, in some parts of Toronto pretty much everyone still does it.

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Each to their own. People are choosing for themselves. And that’s really all this is about – giving people choice.

The other aspect of fearmongering that needs to be confronted is the handwringing over whether there would be disputes or even outright violence between the masked and unmasked. This mostly came from people who were opposed to the lifting of the mandate who said they feared those who kept the masks on would be bullied.

But given the hostility that society has been encouraged to show towards people who haven’t been keen to follow pandemic measures, it seemed likelier that if anyone would be bullied it would be those who chose to unmask. After all, there was quite an aggressive campaign on the part of some doctors vocal on social media along with some news outlets to dehumanize those who chose not to mask by labeling them selfish and worse.

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The good news though is that this low regard for the good people of Ontario proved utterly wrong. There’s been no surge in COVID conflict. Sure, there’s probably been a few rude exchanges here and there. It’s bound to happen in a province of almost 15 million people. But, for the most part, Ontario’s first week without a mask mandate has been just fine.

Let’s not forget that we didn’t actually use masks in the first wave of the pandemic in Ontario. I can picture myself standing in those long line-ups in grocery stores back in April 2020, making that biweekly trek out of the house for supplies, and nobody wore a mask at that time. That was when we were still being told by public health that masks didn’t work.

If we could go without mask mandates back then, when there were no vaccines and no treatments and we thought COVID was worse than it proved to be, we can do without them now. Everything’s going to be fine.