On March 1st, 2022, the mask mandate for the state of Connecticut, and soon after for some other east coast states would officially be lifted, meaning that masks had become optional. To some it may seem like a good thing, however, I think this was a terrible decision that just lays out the framework for a long set of negative consequences anyone with common sense is going to see coming. 

An example on a much smaller scale would happen on July 11th, 2020 where an anti-mask group in Florida would begin handing out food to anyone without a mask. As you would expect this would attract a large group of maskless people to the area, but according to a Global News article made a few days later, the state would hit a new record of having 15,300 new cases being reported on that same day. The takeaway from this being that a large group of maskless people is going to leave us with a massive spike in cases.

While one can say that people were not under the effects of vaccines nor is the virus as severe today, anyone who has looked into this more recently is also aware that vaccines are slowly decreasing in their effectiveness. According to an article by The New York Times made last year in July, The initial Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness had dropped from 90% to a whopping 39% effectiveness from its initial release in January. 

This concerns me because of how this can cause some people to lose trust in the vaccines and not want to take the others. And more importantly we could soon enough be back to square one in terms of protection against the virus.

Yet even if the vaccines have that much or little of an impact on us, we still need to account for those the virus affects the most, that being the elderly or those with compromised immune systems. And letting an entire state go maskless is going to lead to a rise in cases overall, which will not look good for the U.S because its already the country with the most deaths and cases in the entire world, and this may have a negative psychological effect on other states, implying that if a few states are removing their mandates then maybe they should too, which clearly is not good because of how it will just boost the virus’ spread further.

So to conclude I think the lifting of the mask mandate here in Connecticut happened much sooner than it should have, and we need to remind ourselves that we aren’t fully ready to move on with the virus. It will keep claiming lives and actions like this will only increase its spread even further.