Mask wearing helps protect other people

Thank you for your open letter to myself and fellow islanders. For myself, at the age of 70-something and as a confirmed technophobe, I found it most refreshing to be so clearly and fully communicated with in a format that I grew up with, can understand and am able to gain access to.

Acknowledgement of receipt is, I recall, one of the conventions of letter writing etiquette, sadly now unfashionable if my unanswered letters to States deputies on other subjects is anything to go by.

However, you at least must be in communication with the greater mass of islanders, since you state that lateral flow testing has been embraced by them and that most are supportive of the wearing of a mask. Indeed this latter point was borne out, later on the publication date of your letter, by the responses from almost all the people in an ad hoc street interview broadcast on local television (my concession to modern communication technology, despite difficulty in sourcing replacement valves). In fact there was only one dissenting voice who regarded the mandatory wearing of a mask as ‘tyrannical’ but whom, rather confusingly, added that it was fine for individuals to choose to do so if it made them feel ‘safer, more comfortable’. Herein might lay an answer to your question as to why most islanders are not wearing a mask. Evidently the owner of that dissenting voice had not fully understood that a mask cannot protect the wearer from infection, so what ‘comfort’ or rather benefit can there be? The benefit is that it protects other people from being infected by the mask wearer, if that person happens to be infectious. Although you address that very point in your open letter, by reference to ‘reducing transmissions’, the concept of having to rely on other people to protect you while they rely on you to protect them in return is alien to most people and may take constant repetition before it is accepted for what it is – the ‘new normal’. It might seem a simple matter to get that message across to the population of an island smaller than a small UK town, given what I’m told about the modern communications technology that can ‘shrink the world’, but then again every public telephone box I try to use seems to have a permanent fault on the line.

D LANE

3, Kingston Terrace

Les Amballes

St Peter Port

GY1 1WU