LONDON – The British, a town famous for looking annoying in times of trouble, have slowly, if ever, taken off face masks during the coronavirus pandemic. Jim Williams says that people in his hometown of Newcastle even yelled at him and shot him angry looks when he wore one.
“The British prefer to be sick than ashamed,” said Williams, 31, adding that his own family had rejected the masks he had bought from them. “We are all very concerned about doing what other people are doing and not wanting to be seen as hysterical or ridiculous.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, rushing to reopen Europe’s hardest hit country, stepped in on the side of shame instead of illness on Tuesday: He ordered people to wear masks inside shops and supermarkets in England, ending months of mistake. the case
The hesitations about facial coatings have been puzzling by many scientists and eerily recall Britain’s delay in imposing a blockade in March, part of a laissez-faire approach to the pandemic that has drawn intense criticism. In March, Mr. Johnson proclaimed Britain “a land of freedom” as he resisted blocking countries across Europe. He himself later became ill with the virus.
Britain now has the third highest death toll in the world from Covid-19, more than 50,000 by an official count, and approximately 45,000 by another, behind only the United States and Brazil. Scientists say the slow reactions of the conservative government have cost thousands of lives.
The investment in face masks, which will take effect on July 24, puts England in line with other European countries, such as Germany, Italy and Spain, France plans to make them mandatory in closed spaces on August 1, and with Scotland, which It is part of Great Britain but sets its own health policy. About half of the US states require masks in some public spaces, but the rules vary widely.
Britain has largely avoided the partisan debate over the masks that has engulfed the United States. Instead, the government’s hesitation to order them stemmed from internal discussions among scientific advisers about the usefulness of the masks and an apparent concern to ensure that a scarce resource was used where it was most needed.
But on Tuesday there were signs of an American-style split on the matter.
In an almost empty House of Commons, conservative lawmaker Desmond Swayne on Tuesday criticized what he called “this monstrous imposition against me and a number of outraged and reluctant constituents.”
“Nothing,” he said, “would make me less likely to shop than the idea of having to mask myself.”
Police were also enraged by asking him to enforce the new rules by imposing fines of up to £ 100, or $ 125, with an officers’ union that called it “unrealistic and unfair” to expect them to patrol the store aisles.
For stores that had already told customers to wear masks, the requirement was a relief. Just as the government’s slow pace of imposing a closure in March forced closing decisions on individual citizens and merchants, so its reluctance to set a rule on facial masks left individuals and businesses struggling to chart their own paths.
“Obviously the pandemic is not over, and we really just wanted to open if we could keep everyone as safe as possible,” said Gayle Lazda, a bookstore at the London Review Bookshop in central London, which has required masks since it reopened its doors. this month. “Just like before the closing happened, we closed the store because it seemed the only sensible thing to do.”
Some scientists had pleaded for months with Mr. Johnson’s government to pay attention to the growing evidence that the masks could help stop the spread of the virus. But the government resisted, and England’s deputy chief medical officer said on April 3 that “there is no evidence that the general use of facial masks by the public that is well affects the spread of the disease in our society.”
Recently, on April 28, the government’s powerful Emergency Scientific Advisory Group retroactively edited the minutes of a previous meeting to emphasize that “it would be unreasonable to claim a great benefit from wearing a mask.”
The advisers’ doubts reflected what critics called an overly rigid approach to science. The advisers emphasized the lack of evidence from randomized controlled trials, a bar that external scientists said was impossible to meet, especially due to difficulties in measuring how a person’s mask could protect others.
“Some scientists believe that a high level of certainty is required before giving advice to the public to put on a mask or other behaviors that reduce the transmission of the disease,” said Paul Edelstein, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, who helped Write an influential report to British scientific advisers encouraging facial covers this month.
Masks have been mandatory on public transport in England since mid-June, and the government had previously encouraged, but did not require, masks in confined spaces. But the minutes of their meetings show that government scientific advisers worried about the possibility that the masks make people more willing to leave home with symptoms or violate social distancing measures.
Trisha Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care at Oxford University, published an analysis on April 9 asking the government to consider how little to lose and how much to gain, by encouraging widespread use of masks. She said in an interview that the problem required considering a broader range of evidence than some scientists were trained to trust, such as studies of super-spreader events on cruise ships.
“They are creatures of their own upbringing,” he said of some of the government’s scientific advisers. “They have a lot of entrenched assumptions about what counts as rigor, so science is not rigorous enough.”
Britain was far from alone in distrusting masks. Without knowing the extent of symptomless transmission, scientists in the United States and with the World Health Organization also were slow to encourage its use, said Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society, a scientific body in Britain.
But the British proved to be especially slow to voluntarily adopt masks, as only 21 percent of people said they wore one in public, according to a YouGov analysis published in June.
That placed Britain far behind almost all of Europe, Asia, and America. Even in France, which has not yet required masks in stores, 79 percent of people wore them, YouGov said. The same was done by 69 percent of Americans.
Beyond the discomfort, the British complained in polls that they felt self-conscious, foolish, and embarrassed in masks. That reflected in part what Peter York, a prominent social commentator, described as a long-standing dislike, particularly among the upper classes, for appearing shaken by disease or distress.
“There is a class-based idea that anything too valetudinarian, too conspicuously hygienic, is middle class,” he said, using a long word to be overly anxious about health. “It is one of the bravado of the English upper class, that being madly hygienic is nonsense.”
For 22-year-old Ayla Hogg, who had long been wearing a mask around her village in Scotland, the introduction of a national mandate in recent days was a comfort after months of disconcerting reactions to her mask.
“There are people who deliberately avoid you, and you feel very self-conscious, like you might be exaggerating with this,” she said. “The British are incredibly uncomfortable at best. Going against the norm is very, very strange, and it makes you feel a bit like a stranger. ”
Aurelien Breeden and Emma Bubola contributed reporting.
