Upon the start of the lockdown in mid-March, many lawn signs hailing healthcare workers as heroes popped up in many places in Bowling Green. And for good reason: doctors, nurses, and others working in our hospital have been taking enormous risks to their life and health simply by treating patients with coronavirus and thereby safeguarding the health of the entire community. But properly honoring healthcare workers requires more than just words of gratitude; what they need is for us to take action to ensure their safety, health, and fitness to continue doing their work. Similar concern and regard should be extended to other unsung heroes – all essential workers who tirelessly insure we are not deprived of what we want and need either by delivering our mail to our door, collecting our waste, keeping our streets clean, or stacking the shelves of grocery stores.
To protect these crucial workers, the numbers of (resurging) Covid-19 cases must be kept down as much as possible. This will prevent hospitals from being overrun with patients. Overwhelmed and overworked doctors and nurses cannot perform their complex and intense tasks adequately and effectively. In addition, having to ration care for lack of ICU capacity, which under covid circumstances means sending away patients basically to their deaths, is a traumatic emotional and moral burden for healthcare workers. Such burdens have even culminated to suicide for some individuals. This is not a way to treat heroes!
One approach to preventing these misfortunes is for people to wear masks or face coverings in public. Although this is only small-scale step in the direction of keeping infections down, it is nonetheless quite effective if done properly, and can have large-scale outcomes; research shows masks can be up to 95% effective in slowing the spread of the virus. Most importantly, wearing masks can be practiced by the average person with little personal sacrifice at a time when crucial workers are taking so much more risk. If there is a small thing we can all do for the protection of our healthcare and other crucial workers, why refuse to do it? The answer is clear especially when we start seeing healthcare workers as a health and medical resource, which is finite, scarce, and expensive. We’re all aware of the tremendous social and personal investment required to develop their professional skills and capabilities. Protecting them from harm is both humane and socially useful.
This is why the ordinance passed by the BG City Council mandating the use of face masks, for as long there is an emergency-related need for it, is justified. However, this mandate has been attacked by some who appeal to constitutional and ‘god-given’ rights to personal autonomy and freedom. There is no doubt that the right to autonomy is fundamental, but comes second to the right to life, which is the right to stay alive and healthy. But as any right generates a relevant duty, so does the right to life immediately creates the obligation to try to prevent harm to the lives and health of others, especially when the required action does not make great demands on personal wellbeing.
Wearing face masks in public is an individual and collective action based on appropriate moral, practical, and scientific grounds. This is what we ought to do if “we’re all in this together” and this is not an empty slogan but a true social commitment.
Vassiliki Leontis
Bowling Green
