Pressed by top Democrats and many health experts to adopt a statewide mask mandate in the face of mounting hospitalizations, Gov. Phil Scott has held firm.
Doing so wouldn’t help matters, he has argued, and only further polarize an increasingly churlish public.
“The people who want to wear masks are wearing them now. Providing more controversy with a mandate hardens both sides,” he told the press during a briefing Tuesday, sounding somewhat exasperated.
Pre-Delta studies showed that mask mandates made a difference. Administration officials do not dispute that. But they argue that something has changed, nearly two years into the pandemic. Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine said he’s talked to health officials in the half-dozen states that have kept or re-instated mandates.
“Their first comment is that it’s very different now. Compliance is very challenging,” he said.
Many are clearly dead-set against masking, as unruly crowds at selectboard and city council meetings across the state appear to indicate. But the governor’s critics argue he is ignoring solid evidence that mandates nevertheless move the needle in nontrivial ways.
“States that enacted policies during the Delta period saw an immediate increase in masking and all have consistently higher rates of masking,” said Anne Sosin, a public health researcher and policy fellow at Dartmouth College.
As evidence, Sosin points to survey data from Facebook collected by the Delphi Group at Carnegie Mellon University showing that people in the six states with statewide mask mandates report covering their faces in public much more frequently than in Vermont. In Hawaii, for example, 82% of respondents recently reported wearing masks indoors while in public. In the Green Mountain State, 61% did.
Administration officials have also argued that mandates would do little to improve masking where it would matter most — in homes and at parties.
“Contact tracing in Vermont suggests that cases are being driven by private gatherings among friends and family and within households themselves,” Jason Maulucci, Scott’s press secretary, told VTDigger in October.
People are indeed catching Covid-19 from household members, dinner parties and holiday gatherings. But it’s not clear this is the primary source of infection. Asked for evidence that these settings were responsible for driving transmission, a spokesperson for the Department of Health responded that in only 25% of current cases could a close contact even be identified at all as the source of spread. And even then, private gatherings were not necessarily to blame.
“We know of less than six active outbreaks that originated from private social gatherings,” Health Department spokesperson Ben Truman wrote.
In the vast majority of cases, he said — about 70% — the cause of transmission is now unknown.
Two former Vermont health commissioners have said they support a mask mandate in the current surge. Jan Carney, the associate dean for public health at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, told VTDigger in September a short-term mandate could temper Delta’s impact. And Harry Chen, who chaired the state’s vaccine advisory committee, called for one in a recent op-ed.
Chen said he decided to publish his column after failing to make headway with private appeals to administration officials. And he credited them with handling the pandemic uniquely well — until now.
“I’d say I’m a bit surprised by the complacency at this point,” he said.
He grants a mask mandate is no silver bullet, and he hesitated to characterize to what extent he believed a mandate would improve matters. But he said not acting simply is not an option.
“To stand by and watch these numbers and watch the stress on our health care system and do nothing in terms of intervening — I mean, it doesn’t make sense,” he said.
The governor does have his defenders. Tim Lahey, an infectious disease physician and director of clinical ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center, echoed Scott, faulting “unhelpful binary conversations” about mandates from obscuring what matters.
“I think it makes sense, as much as possible, to focus on what most people agree with, which is it’s just not such a big deal to wear a mask to save lives,” he wrote.
Lahey said he would be fine with a mask mandate in the town where he lives. But he also argues there’s just not much data on either side of the argument that a mandate would help or hurt things right now.
“That leaves proponents (to) make their instinctive guesses about how a mask mandate will impact things and detractors do the opposite,” he said.
Brian Zikmund-Fisher, a professor of health behavior and health education at University of Michigan School of Public Health, agrees that it’s hard to say with much certainty what a mandate itself would do, given the available evidence.
And messaging around masking, he argued, should spend more time validating the feelings of an exhausted public.
“I don’t think the messaging spends enough time acknowledging, frankly, how much it sucks. Like nobody — myself included — wants to be wearing a mask,” he said.
But he said if it was up to him, he would still mandate them indoors. Rising cases, hospitalizations and deaths demand intervention — however imperfect.
“Our hospitals are getting seriously overloaded. Our school systems are being burned out because of the issues of Covid. We need it if not for ourselves but for others that we care about,” he said.