In a recent survey of six countries suffering from severe covid-19 outbreaks, Britons were clear outliers in their reluctance to don masks
FUTURE HISTORIANS looking back on 2020 will be struck by its dystopian imagery: footballers taking to the pitch wearing masks in Brazil; models strutting down the catwalk in couture coverings in France; a head of government being sworn into office, his face shrouded in a surgical guise, in Slovakia. Wearing masks—hitherto an almost exclusively East Asian practice—has gone viral.of six countries suffering from severe covid-19 outbreaks, Britain was a clear outlier in its reluctance to don masks.
The British government may be partly to blame. When the virus first emerged, government officials downplayed the effectiveness of masks, perhaps in part because such personal protective equipment was in short supply.
Such scepticism is also common in America, where the issue has become polarised along partisan lines. Many on the right argue that obliging people to wear masks in public—something that scores of Western countries, including France and Germany, have done—infringes on citizens’ civil liberties. In Oklahoma local officials in a handful of cities were forced to repeal mandatory mask requirements.
Reluctant Britons and Americans may only embrace masks in the face of fines, like those being levied in Singapore or Qatar. But the
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