RIGHTS OR RESPONSIBILITY?

Good news! I read this week that a Span­ish cab­i­net meet­ing on Feb­ru­ary 7 will ap­prove lift­ing the face mask man­date on pub­lic trans­port, which has been com­pul­sory since the spring of 2020. Ac­cord­ing to the web­site cata­lan­news.com, “Span­ish health min­is­ter Car­olina Darias an­nounced that she would pro­pose to the pub­lic health In­tert­er­ri­to­r­ial Coun­cil meet­ing that the mea­sure be scrapped.” Poor syn­tax aside, this an­nounce­ment came the day after the head of Spain’s Cen­ter for the Co­or­di­na­tion of Health Alerts and Emer­gen­cies, Fer­nando Simón, said: “The sit­u­a­tion in China dur­ing these last weeks has com­pli­cated the de­ci­sion, but it will be [lifted] soon, ei­ther next week or the fol­low­ing one,” be­fore adding that ex­perts be­lieve the cur­rent epi­demi­o­log­i­cal sit­u­a­tion to be “very sta­ble”.

Just one thing about that though… what face mask man­date? I can’t speak for other places, but if you live in Barcelona, you would’ve thought this reg­u­la­tion had al­ready been phased out some months ago. Well, on the Metro at least. It’s true that if you travel by bus, not only does every­one still wear a face mask, but bus dri­vers may even stop the bus to de­mand that peo­ple wear one. In fact, on a trip back to town on the air­port bus I re­cently wit­nessed a dri­ver shout­ing at some be­mused look­ing tourists in Eng­lish: “Put the mask! It’s not dif­fi­cult!” Again, for­give the poor Eng­lish.

But the Metro? On a re­cent jour­ney up to the foot­ball ground lo­cated near the Ronda de Dalt where my son and I play every week, the ratio of mask wear­ers to – what shall we call them? Mask ob­jec­tors? Yes, let’s go with that – was around one to ten.

Per­son­ally, I’ve never been a mask ob­jec­tor, but I know plenty of peo­ple who are, and judg­ing by the afore­men­tioned Metro data col­lec­tion, al­beit based on a very small sam­ple, it would seem that I’m now in the vast mi­nor­ity. How­ever, since the mo­ment I un­der­stood that by wear­ing a mask in closed spaces I might be sav­ing some­one’s grand­par­ent’s or par­ent’s life, it be­came a bit of a no-brainer for me from a hu­man­i­tar­ian stand­point.

And be­cause it was such an ob­vi­ous sac­ri­fice for me to make per­son­ally, I’ve found it very dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand why other peo­ple would refuse to com­ply with the reg­u­la­tion, with many – es­pe­cially younger – peo­ple seem­ingly view­ing it as an in­fringe­ment of their per­sonal rights and free­doms. Sim­ply put, wear­ing a mask to save the spread­ing of a deadly virus doesn’t re­ally seem to have much to do with rights and free­doms to my mind, more to do with per­sonal re­spon­si­bil­ity.

In terms of mak­ing cul­tural com­par­isons, which is the basic remit of this col­umn, UK gov­ern­ment data re­veal that around one in five adults (22%) used a face cov­er­ing when out­side their home from 21 De­cem­ber 2022 to 8 Jan­u­ary 2023, al­though those who used a face cov­er­ing did not nec­es­sar­ily use it al­ways or often. And I would say that on my re­cent vis­its to the UK, at­ti­tudes to­wards mask-wear­ing have very much echoed what I have seen here in Barcelona , with both cul­tures happy to thumb their noses at the idea of wear­ing one. So it’s a bloody good job we don’t need them any more then, isn’t it?

opin­ion