Who Wants to Mask Up for Delta?

U.S. authorities are getting another chance at mask advice with the upwelling of the Delta variant. Will they get it right this time—by which I mean achieving not an angry social meme but giving guidance that will actually have good practical effect?

Reduced to a nugget of precision, the best words right now might be: If you are an unvaccinated or otherwise vulnerable person, keep a distance from people who aren’t wearing masks.

Everything else is fine print. If you are a vaccinated person going about your business in most respects, it is not your job to compensate for others’ unwillingness to be vaccinated. If you are attending on a vulnerable person, wear a mask. Because children under 12 are not eligible for the vaccine and are at extremely low risk from Covid, their caregivers should be vaccinated or find other work.

The Delta variant has collided with our lousy monitoring system, based on biased voluntary testing to tell us how many have gotten Covid.

Delta is clearly spreading among the fully vaccinated, but we have no idea how extensively because people with mild or asymptomatic cases are unlikely to seek testing.