Our View: Keep wearing your ‘face diapers’ in spite of critics

As you may have seen, we recently have started a daily video feature in which one of our staffers gives viewers a preview of stories we are working on for the following day’s edition.

On Wednesday afternoon, when we sent the video link out on Twitter, here’s how one wise soul responded to our reporter wearing a mask during the video: “Take off your Face Diaper.”

You have to have a thick skin in this business — and we do — so we’re not all that bothered by one sarcastic comment, or a handful of others.

Haha, we get it it, face masks look like diapers. Wow. Haven’t heard that before.

Here’s what’s not funny: On Thursday 362 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Luzerne County, along with 10 more deaths, the Department of Health reported. There were 11,406 additional positive cases of COVID-19 across Pennsylvania.

To put the county’s numbers into more context:

• Over the course of a week, Luzerne County has tracked 53 additional coronavirus deaths, county Manager C. David Pedri said Thursday. The latest victims bring the county’s November coronavirus death count to 106.

• To date, 11 county residents have died in December.

• There were 23 deaths in October, one in September and four in August.

While more than half of the latest victims were from nursing homes or other group living facilities, 21 were not.

As state health officials stressed earlier this week, all but one county is facing “substantial” spread of the virus, which has been described as a positivity rate over 10%.

Luzerne County’s positivity rate, or percentage of diagnostic tests yielding positive results, has been in the upper 13% range recently.

All of this points to significant community spread, here and across the state. No doubt Thanksgiving travel and gatherings played a role, though we don’t yet know the full extent.

While the world anxiously awaits effective vaccines, health officials continue to plead with citizens to limit interaction with people outside their homes and to wear masks during such interactions. As we do here in our office.

These are among many imperfect solutions that have been imposed. Short of an entire shutdown of civil society, this is where we are. Masks are a tool to slow the spread, nothing more, nothing less.

We know some of you still believe that being required to wear masks in public is some kind of infringement on your sacred personal liberties, and that you insist on spreading the anti-mask gospel — along with the virus — to anyone dumb enough or unlucky enough to be in earshot.

So if you want to rip a reporter for wearing a mask in a video, that says more about what kind of human being you are than whatever imagined “virtue signal” of oppression your conspiracy theories tell you to be on guard against.

To those who are reasonable but understandably weary of masks and limitations: Please be strong, hold on, and wear your masks.

We were warned months ago that the virus would likely make a comeback in the fall, and so it has. That’s a combination of its nature and ours.

We’re spending more time indoors as the weather gets colder. Many of us did visit family and friends for Thanksgiving, despite the warnings. And others are getting lax about mask-wearing because, yes, masks are awkward and annoying. We get it.

Let us close with Pedri’s words, as he encouraged residents to wear masks, wash hands and maintain a distance from others.

“An astonishing 327 of our friends and neighbors here in Luzerne County who were with us at the start of this year, now won’t see the end of this year,” Pedri said. “These are our community’s mothers, fathers, siblings, neighbors and friends who were struck down by this virus. They are not faceless victims.”

— Times Leader