Many were wearing masks, but less because of the peril of viruses than to make a statement. Mask-wearing meant acceptance of the official expert position that the country was in a state of perpetual pathogen siege and that this justified the government exercising vast emergency powers. The fact that almost no one was still sick that November was irrelevant; to deny the need to wear masks forever was to deny science itself. And science denial was bad, unless the science was inconvenient, in which case science denial became a moral imperative.
