Masks
My first ever face mask experience on public transport: June 2020
I hate wearing a facemask.
Four-eyed folk like me have it worse than the rest of you, as our glasses steam up every time we breathe. I’ve spent much of the last year navigating stations, shops and my daughter’s school drop-off in a kind of fog.
So, at a personal level, I’m delighted that Boris says we can whip them off on July 19th.
But despite my personal enthusiasm, this post is going to suggest that the right thing for the transport industry is to maintain the mask mandate for trains and buses.
There are three reasons for this:
1) Perception
2) Risk
3) Habit
Let’s go through these in order, starting with the most important.
Perception
Through its actions, the Government has allowed a perception to arise that public transport isn’t safe. It’s therefore all the more critical that public transport operators do everything conceivably possible to demonstrate that services are safe.
Do you remember how your driving instructor told you that it wasn’t enough to look in the mirror before the manoeuvre: you had to twist your head in an exaggerated mime to ensure the examiner saw that you’d done it. “Mirror, signals, manoeuvre” was about being seen to look in the mirror, or you’d fail.
So with public transport for the next year or so: everything possible needs to be done to show that the priority is a safe environment. Given that facemasks are all about protecting other people, this can’t be done if facemasks are voluntary. If people fear that they’re going to be opposite someone without a facemask, it becomes much less relevant whether or not they will themselves be wearing one.
This matters as the Government is a lot more bullish than the public. Despite the Government’s fear of extending the restrictions, the four-week delay from June to July commanded 70% support. Nearly the same proportion (64%) of the public intend to keep wearing a facemask, according to YouGov’s research. SavantaComRes has an even higher figure at 74%:
The evidence suggests that around two-thirds of the public are still going to be worried about Covid even when restrictions lift. If that’s the case, two-thirds of the public would rather know that if they board a train, everyone else is going to be masked up.
This is backed up by Transport Focus’s weekly tracker, which shows that 58% of the public say they won’t use public transport unless facemasks are compulsory. In the environment we’re in, can the transport industry really afford to test if 58% of the public are lying?
This sense of the Government being ahead of the public also comes through from reading Transport Focus’s very recent focus group research into facemasks. One of their headlines from their focus groups is:
There is a desire for some restrictions to remain in place, with an expectation that masks are here to stay for some time
This line is also very important:
The highest levels of anxiety are generally felt by those who have not travelled on public transport for some time, and who are apprehensive about starting again.
Retaining the facemask rule is popular. According to YouGov, people overwhelmingly want the rule retained even when the law changes:
Given that public transport usage is hovering at around 50% of the pre-pandemic norm, while car use is back where it was, everything possible must be done to make the lapsed user feel safe. Ending the mask mandate is unlike to do this.
The research also shows a desire for clarity and consistency; which the “personal responsibility” message from the Government misses entirely.
Remember, all this is in the context that according to Transport Focus’s weekly tracker, one in three people currently believe they will never feel safe on public transport again. Remember: “mirror, signal, manoeuvre”.
Now you might say “people will change their minds once the restrictions are lifted”, but I doubt it. As I’m writing this, the most-read story on the BBC News website is “Ex-soap star in hospital with ‘horrific’ Covid”; beating into second place “PM to set out final lockdown easing for England”. Given that Covid isn’t going anywhere just yet, stories of celebrity illness and deaths will maintain its salience. “Mirror, signals, manoeuvre”.
I’m not saying facemasks should remain compulsory forever: just that the public isn’t ready to whip them off just yet.
My wife on a boat trip, unrecognisable in sunglasses, sunhat and mask. Maybe we should scrap the rule on outdoor transport!
2. Risk
The second reason for maintaining the mask mandate is that it reduces the risk of Covid transmission. Yes, the Government has decided to eliminate central rules and make individuals responsible. And, in general, I applaud the Government for not making centralised decisions when it doesn’t need to.
But the Government is not saying that the risk has disappeared: just that they are asking everyone to make their own decisions. As legal persons, that includes transport companies, who also need to evaluate the risk.
And the evidence is that facemasks are remarkably effective.
In June last year, Goldman Sachs decided to try to calculate the value of face masks. Characteristically for Goldman Sachs, they focused on the impact of masks on GDP, not on lives saved. But the evidence was overwhelming: masks make a big difference. Obviously, this research was based on classic Covid, not the new souped-up version. But it’s highly likely that masks remain one of the single most powerful interventions.
This is backed up by the experience of Japan. Despite having the largest, most crowded city on earth to deal with, Japan has had a remarkably small Covid pandemic. Infection rates can vary by testing but deaths are a much more reliable benchmark. This graph shows the UK pandemic set against the Japanese:
It is impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that a big part of the reason is that Japan had an exceptionally high rate of facemask wearing before the pandemic even began. There’s a whole seperate article to be written on the origins of Japan’s facemask culture (and, idneed, it’s been written. This article dates from 2017 and highlights just how universal face masks were in Japan long before Covid was a glint in a Wuhan pangolin’s eye).
In fact, The Economist quotes Nishimura Yasutoshi (paywall), the Japanese minister responsible for Covid response, as saying that even crowded subway trains pose little risk - but in the context of universal mask-wearing. In a separate article, The Economist looked at it a different way. Instead of working out what behaviours are likely to be risky based on epidemiology, they crunched data for what has already happened. They took estimates of the “R” reproduction rate from Imperial College and correlated them with movement data from mobile phones to see what behaviours caused infection to spread. Their conclusion (paywall):
Usage of parks or public transport had no impact, perhaps because visitors are outside or wearing masks
(Again, this data is pre-variant but seems likely to hold true).
Public transport is rightly very risk-averse when it comes to safety. Much effort and investment is put into ensuring vehicles, signals and tracks are safe in order to avoid harm to customers. The standard approach is to implement interventions to reduce risks to a level that is “ALARP” - i.e. “As Low As Reasonably Practical”.
Given the uncertainty around Covid at the moment and the fact that the mask mandates are already in place, it is hard to argue that withdrawing this intervention is would be consistent with this approach. At yesterday’s Downing Street briefing, the Chief Medical Officer alerted us to the fact that we’re in a “rising pandemic” and should “behave accordingly”. He also spoke about the potential for “any competent authority” to require mask-wearing; because masks are there to help others.
Now, you could argue that - by this logic - the mask mandate can never be withdrawn. But that is not the case. ALARP does not require the elimination of risk, but it does require the understanding of risk and the reduction of risks that can reasonably be reduced. If we got to the stage where the existence of the mask mandate on public transport was making very little practical difference (for example, we had reached near-universal levels of vaccination and the pandemic was largely controlled, or it could be proved that mask-wearing on trains was irrelevant without other interventions elsewhere in society) then it would be different. But that is not where we are today.
3. Habits
Habits are hard to form and easy to break.
We all hope that there is not a new variant that causes restrictions to need to increase. With luck, there won’t be.
Killing their hosts is a poor evolutionary strategy for a virus. There are more individual viruses on earth than there are stars in the universe and most are harmless. As Covid evolves, it would be expected to become more infectious and less deadly. There is a theory that the 1899 Russian Flu pandemic which killed 1 million people was actually a previous coronavirus pandemic, and that the coronavirus in question then gradually evolved to be more infectious and less fatal and is still in widespread circulation as one of many pathogens labelled “the common cold”.
We’re all worried about a vaccine-resistant strain emerging but the evidence suggests that the vaccines are more effective at preventing deaths than they are at preventing infection. If so, the vaccines are the virus’s friend, so a resistant strain may not survive.
All this is saying that it’s likely that the ending of restrictions will be, as the Prime Minister promises, “irreversible”.
But, having said all that, what do I know? We should expect the unexpected, and right now, passengers expect to wear a mask. Until we’re in a position of clarity, let’s not break those habits.
Stick together
This article is arguing that based on commercial necessity, safety obligations and pragmatism, it makes sense to retain the mask rule following July 19th.
It is tempting to say that because the Government is removing the rule at a central level, that means train and bus companies are obliged to follow suit. But that should not be the case. Most transport companies had no smoking rules before the smoking ban for all the reasons described above: the health of their customers and sheer commercial necessity.
That doesn’t mean that rule shouldn’t be tweaked. It is clearly bonkers that facemasks have to be worn on the decks of ships and on open-top buses. And maybe the rule could be made more nuanced: for example, creating an official exemption for near-empty vehicles. Making some changes might also make it easier to sell to Government the idea of retaining some rules, though a wise Government would treat this as an operational decision for operators and not get involved.
But if local transport companies make their own individual decisions, the customer environment could be very confusing. Given that Covid rules already have a reputation for being hard to follow, it would make sense for the industry to agree this at an industry level.
But if that is to happen, it will need to happen fast.
