Who is that masked man?

It's become routine at this point. I stopped at Kum and Go on my way to work this morning. Before I went in to grab my usual breakfast sandwich and coffee, I pulled up a bandana over my face.

Like my wallet and cell phone, the black piece of elastic material has become just another item that I make sure to grab before I leave the house.

This should be the case for more people.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not over, but you'd barely know that if you looked at the shoppers in Target. For a little while it seemed like a good chunk of people were on the same page about this, but as soon as the businesses started to re-open and the pandemic fell out of the daily headlines, a bunch of those people apparently decided that it was safe to go back to normal.

For the last several weeks I've been reporting about the various relaxing of regulations as the governor reopens the economy and I would bet that you could find a direct correlation between those relaxed restrictions and the number of people deciding it's no longer necessary to wear a mask in public.

This behavior is as misguided as it is predictable.

Look, I get it.

The mask can be uncomfortable. It presses on your nose and fogs up your glasses. You might feel self-conscious wearing it. I know I sure did.

I was not an early adopter. It was a month into the pandemic before I finally ordered myself a bandana face covering. I still feel like I'm about to rob a train every time I pull it up.

At first, I only wore the mask in high population areas. The grocery store or any place where I was sure to be spending prolonged periods of time around relatively large groups of people. But, as time passed and the confirmed cases increased, I've become more comfortable wearing it basically any time I'm out in public. Even if it's just a quick stop at the gas station.

I don't wear the mask for my own protection. This has been one of the key misunderstandings of the pandemic. Early on, when people were raiding hospital lobbies for free masks, word got out that wearing a mask during your daily life was not a particularly effective prevention measure.

This is true at the micro level. If you're not a health care professional, doing all the various things health care professionals do to protect themselves from exposure, then the mask isn't going to help you that much.

But then we hit the community spread stage of the pandemic. The stage where the virus is spreading across vectors that can no longer be effectively tracked. So now we're talking about the macro level. An individual person wearing a mask isn't going to be particularly safe in a world where the virus is freely spreading with every cough and sneeze. However, if everybody is wearing a mask, then every cough and sneeze is considerably more contained.

This is the basic principle behind herd immunity. Vaccines don't stop the spread of viruses just because they protect the vaccinated, but because the vaccinated people don't spread the virus to others. We don't have a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, but a mask is the next best option.

So no, I don't wear a mask for my protection. That's not what it's for.

And really, I don't even wear it because I'm overly concerned that I may be an asymptomatic carrier. My risk of exposure is relatively low, all things considered.

I wear the mask because somebody in my community is infected. Right now. They may know it. They may just suspect it. They may be completely oblivious.

Whatever the case, the more comfortable that person is with wearing a mask, the safer we all are. The more people there are wearing masks in public, the more comfortable those that should be wearing masks will be doing so.

When I do see people wearing masks in public, it's often older people. Those at a higher risk of a fatal complication. And good for them on trying to stay safe, but here's the thing. They aren't.

82% of the confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Iowa have been found in people under 60. Nearly half of them have been in people between the age of 18 and 40, the age group least likely to die, but most likely to catch and spread it. It's this age group, my age group, that should be wearing masks. Not for our protection, but for theirs.

Besides, wearing a mask to protect people. That basically makes you a super-hero.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and has a whole new respect for how Spider-Man does whatever a spider can without fogging up his lenses.