‘Flunami’: should we be wearing masks?

Kemi Badenoch has rejected calls for masks to be worn in public again, as NHS bosses talk of a coming “tidal wave” of flu infections. I am “still slightly traumatised by all the mask-wearing that we had to do during Covid”, the Tory leader told Sky News.

Staff, patients and visitors to some English hospitals have already been asked to wear face masks. And, with the number of people being admitted to hospital with flu already 50% higher than this time last year, Daniel Elkeles, the CEO of NHS Providers, said that people with flu symptoms “must wear a mask” in public spaces to “stop the chances” of them giving the virus to somebody else.

‘Suffocating and dehumanising’

Face coverings can be “a barrier to social interaction and social cohesion”, said Badenoch. The government shouldn’t be mandating mask-wearing and we should use “common sense” instead. “People can make up their own minds” and, besides, if they’re “really sick”, they should be in bed, “not on public transport”.

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“The evidence for face masks was pretty dodgy last time,” Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was a Tory cabinet minister during the Covid pandemic, told The Telegraph. So why should anyone believe it now? “This is nonsense,” said Reform UK’s Nigel Farage. “I didn’t wear them last time” and won’t wear them now.

Masks are “horrible things”, said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. They’re “suffocating and dehumanising, manky and damp”. During Covid, it was like “living through some Doctor Who episode in which human identities were obscured and individualism was erased”. And now “our finger-wagging boss-ocrats” want us to sacrifice our freedom again “to some elusive notion of a wider good”.

‘Science is more settled’

Masks can help limit “the spread of flu in some situations”, said The Guardian’s health editor, Andrew Gregory. “Wearing a well-fitting mask when unwell can reduce the number of” virus-containing particles released into the air from your mouth and nose. Masks can also protect the wearer “from becoming infected with other respiratory viruses”.

“We were all very good about infection control during Covid and we really, really need to get back to that now,” NHS Providers CEO Elkeles told Times Radio. This is “a very nasty strain of flu” that “spreads very easily” and “people need to be sensible”. If you are “coughing” and “snuffling”, you should wear a mask.

If you don’t want to “be laid low” with flu over “the festive season”, wearing a mask could make the difference: “the science is now more settled” on that, said science reporter Jen Mills in Metro. “In community settings, any mask use is protective during epidemics, especially if used early”, concluded a UK-Australian study published in The BMJ earlier this year.

The view from No.10 is that wearing a face mask is something “people can consider”. This is “not an instruction” but something people could bear in mind to “help limit the spread” of illness this Christmas.