Better education advocated for enforcing mask mandates

America’s slow, painful shift to enforcing mask mandates Mask enforcement won’t work without education. Lois Parshley Vox

Though 33 states now have face mask mandates, Gov. Pete Ricketts says his state of Nebraska will not be joining them. On Monday, Ricketts doubled down on his conviction that a statewide mask mandate would be too “heavy-handed.”

“I don’t want to make it a crime,” he said at a press conference.

Ricketts’s resistance comes as his office is challenging mask ordinances in Lincoln and Lancaster County that have already gone into effect. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, have called his failure to pass a statewide mask order a “dereliction of duty.”

“I would die for my students. Please don’t make me,” read a teacher’s sign at a recent protest across from Ricketts’s office.

Though the science on the effectiveness of masks for reducing the spread of the coronavirus is more established now than it was early in the pandemic, mandatory masking is still a new and contentious idea. Public health experts and unions are calling for a national mandate to protect the most vulnerable, but President Donald Trump has said he opposes it, telling CNN, “No, I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don’t believe in that, no.”

Popular support for mask-wearing is growing: A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted from July 26-27 found that 82 percent of Americans would support a national mask mandate. Yet mask-wearing has also been correlated with partisan identity, and many Americans still refuse to wear them in indoor public settings such as grocery stores, even in states and cities where mandates are in place. Some are even using fake exemption cards to try to get out of wearing a mask where it is now required.

As consensus grows on the urgency of widespread mask use to slow a raging national health crisis, policymakers are finding that mandates may be helpful but not entirely sufficient. Perhaps unsurprisingly, enforcement — whether by local officials, police, or employees of airlines or retailers — is proving challenging.

Meanwhile, lessons from other health campaigns, including seatbelts, condoms, and texting while driving, suggest that public education is just as important if you actually want people to change their behavior....

Many public health experts say that consistent public health education and effective messaging is the most important tool in getting people to change their behavior. Which means that threatening people with being banned from a business or issuing fines or jail time are not actually the best ways to get more people to wear masks in public....

Laws can also be difficult to enforce universally and equitably, says Julia Marcus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School...

“As much as we can shift social norms around wearing masks so that there will be fewer angry people who refuse to wear them — that would be best,” Marcus says....