How Wearing Masks Impacts All Life

    


Masks have been a staple in human lives across the United States for quite some time now. When COVID was first becoming an issue all of the states created laws about when you should wear a mask and when it's safe to take them off. Now, many people are sick of wearing masks and since vaccines came out there is a pretense that COVID cases are going down. On the contrary COVID cases are at a high, with an average of about 20,000 deaths per day (over a period of 46 days in 2022). Many people choose to ignore these facts believing that they are invincible because of their vaccinations and occasional mask wearing. 

Not only has COVID been affecting us, but us not wearing masks has actually been affecting animals. There are dozens of animals in the zoo, lab, and few companion animals  that have caught COVID. On the other hand, in the wild, “white-tailed deer and mink are the only two species that have been found harboring the virus in the woods,” (Which animals have caught the coronavirus?). Animals in the zoo and lab are directly exposed to us without masks or even with masks, but not effective ones. Which is why it's not surprising that they were the first animals to get it. Furthermore, deer come into close contact being in our backyards, so no wonder they were the first wild animals to contract COVID. 

Not everyone is vaccinated, and there is no way to make sure that everyone will become vaccinated. Therefore, there is no way for us to safely not wear masks with the guarantee that cases and death rates won’t go up. Exposing animals to COVID by not wearing masks can also be a huge problem because we don’t know enough information about how they react to the virus. There is no evidence that animals are able to spread the current variations of the virus to us, but there are studies showing that they can mutate the virus and spread an entirely new variant to us. This is what happened in 2020 on a local mink farm, “of the tested mink farm residents…68% had evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Individuals for which whole genomes were available were shown to have been infected with an animal sequence…” (Abstract). Even if we can’t contract the variants humans are getting now, there's still a possibility of contracting an even worse version from animals. 

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