Thoughts on Healthcare, Masking, and Accessibility
I am saddened to see many hospitals in the US drop their masking policies in a still ongoing pandemic without a thought about how this could especially impact their most vulnerable patients. Hospitals are places where everyone gets care but immunocompromised, chronically ill patients who are vulnerable to COVID tend to go to them more frequently. This population is more at risk for severe complications as the result of a COVID infection. While numbers may be low in my area, those numbers are not zero, and people travel to areas with higher numbers, bringing that virus back to our community. India, currently, has had a surge in cases with a new variant, and the same could happen here again. I do not think this is a wise time to loosen any healthcare protections when the virus is still unpredictable and often surges a little more after precautions are done away with.
As someone who studies Disability Studies in school and follows many disability activists, I have seen more people discuss how masks are an accessibility issue during a pandemic and how failure to have health-related protections in place (such as requiring masks) should be regarded as a violation of the ADA. Given everything I have seen during this pandemic as a chronically ill person myself, I agree. I have read story after story of immunocompromised people feeling like they were not safe in public spaces due to the decrease in safety precautions since 2020 despite the virus we have never gotten a full handle on, even with vaccines and boosters. I have also felt unsafe in many public spaces as I try to manage my chronic illnesses without getting COVID on top of them. I don't think it's right for a hospital to add to an immunocompromised person's sense of feeling excluded from public spaces because people did not value their health and safety needs.
You might say, "well, people can still wear masks if they want to." Unfortunately, one-way masking is not enough. If an immunocompromised person wears a mask at a hospital and is surrounded by people who don't wear masks, the risk that they will get infected increases, even if they are a little more protected than without one. Masks work best when everyone wears one. I get that we may be past the point of mandating masks everywhere, but I think requiring masks in hospitals is the bare minimum and should be something we could expect from any place that claims to care about the health and safety of all of its patients, especially immunocompromised ones.
Lastly, while I talk the most about immunocompromised patients because they tend to be the most high risk, doing away with a mask requirement at a hospital would be failing to protect everyone. While most people who aren't immunocompromised don't end up hospitalized or dying, we know now that those are not the only bad outcomes from a COVID infection. For one, there is of course Long COVID, which is a life-changing chronic illness that many are hearing more about as the number of patients with it increases. These patients can no longer work, cannot do the level of physical activity they were once able to, and are having to adjust to having a so far poorly understood chronic illness. Long COVID is a big enough of a deal that we are having conversations about it in my Disability Law class. Then there's the fact that new research is coming out about long-term effects, even after people have mild cases and no signs of Long COVID. Cognitive issues, organ damage, autoimmune disease. This virus is still one we need to take seriously and protect ourselves from.
Our boosters are becoming less effective as time passes without a guarantee of new boosters in sight, people are getting infected and getting long COVID even with boosters, and without a screening area or mask requirements, hospitals are inviting the virus through their doors.
Should hospitals choose to stick with the dropping of the mask policy, I ask them and everyone who supports their decision this: What do you expect immunocompromised patients to do? What do you expect once healthy patients who get Long COVID to do? How can a hospital claim to care about these populations at all when it doesn’t do the bare minimum to protect them?