Mask Wearing Is Becoming the New Normal

Here is the result of a poll taken a few days ago by YouGov for CBS News:

Roughly speaking, it looks like about 70 percent of Americans wear masks routinely when they leave the house. That’s not bad, and a number that high normalizes the behavior enough that it’s likely to increase over time.

This was on my mind because I was thinking about whether we’re headed for a big increase in COVID-19 cases thanks to the relaxation of social distancing restrictions. I think this is pretty likely, but if it doesn’t happen it will most likely be due to widespread mask wearing. Even as we ease off of other restrictions, mask wearing is the one thing that everyone still agrees about.

I hope this is something that’s currently under intense study, both here and in other countries. We need a better handle on which specific measures are most effective at stopping the spread of the virus, and it would certainly be useful to know just how effective mask wearing is even if you do nothing else.

Now just imagine how close to 100 percent we could get if our president and all our governors got on board…

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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