Sunday, Oct. 25, 2020 | 2 a.m.
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My life in the theater taught me that when we are talking, we are spitting.
It is most pronounced when you see actors trained to be heard and understood in the back row, distinct consonants carving, with lips and tongue, the shapes of words into sound. Under the stage lights, you catch glimpses of vapor and drizzle.
Stage actors joke about dodging spit and can share tales of catching something in the eye during emotional or steamy scenes.
It can get downright noxious. I used to work at a theater that earned most of its budget from its annual production of “A Christmas Carol.” In this time of pandemic and social distancing, the memory seems obscene: There might be a dozen or more performers on stage, singing and speaking loudly in front of 700 people at a time, and during flu season at that.
With the addition of sneezing and coughing, dodging influenza was as plain to us as ducking the globules of pestilence that hurtled to and fro while we sang hey-ho sweet hey-ho.
Even in casual speech we exude thousands of respiratory droplets — tiny beads of moisture which serve beautifully as saddles for viruses.
In a study published this spring by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers used a laser light sheet to capture images of how much we emit when speaking, estimating that we put out 2,600 droplets per second when speaking and as many as 10,000 with louder speech.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that smaller droplets can hang around for minutes or hours, and travel on air currents.
As organisms, human beings are rather spitty. This makes us very good at spreading contagious disease.
This is no cause for shame. We stage performers even took a weird pride in it, as if we were dodging fire in a theater of war together. Without going that far, a good-humored general awareness of this predicament seems timely as we venture deeper into flu season with the COVID-19 pandemic an active emergency.
Many of us would likely benefit from speaking less, but even when mute we must inhale and exhale.
The case for wearing non-medical cloth masks in public during a viral epidemic is not that they prevent us from getting sick, but that they reduce the droplets we puff into shared spaces, including outdoors.
At a recent televised town hall, President Donald Trump falsely that “they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it.”
“They” are the scientists at the CDC, and that isn’t what they said. In a September report, the agency presented self-reported data from COVID-19 patients indicating that “in the 14 days before illness onset, 71% of case-patients and 74% of control participants reported always using cloth face coverings or other mask types when in public.”
Masks, and non-medical-grade cloth coverings in particular, are not magical shields. Many of us continue to miss the point that the mask is more about protecting others from some of our own spew, while theirs function to protect us, to a limited degree.
Human beings also do not consistently wear them properly, which we may observe in any public setting, where grown adults are still seen with their chins secured beneath their mask (when wearing one at all), noses borne as proudly as a ship’s masthead, honking droplets into the air.
Besides being around unreliable people, we cannot effectively wear masks when drinking or eating, as at a restaurant where we might sit indoors marinating in circulated air.
Greater awareness of our spittiness may help enhance our understanding that masks are but one piece of an imperfect system of layers that mitigate our problem.
As epidemiologists repeatedly advise, that system also includes washing hands often and keeping some distance from others until we have better defenses against SARS-CoV-2.
It is reasonable to expect this of one another.
In one of my local elections, I struggled to decide between two candidates, both of whom have served in public office for years and neither to my satisfaction.
Feeling evenly divided between them, my choice came down to observing their behavior in public during the public health crisis. One man reliably masks up when he is out in the community while the other I have seen idly chatting while standing close to other people, his mask dangling from one ear despite the increasing rate of transmission in our county.
All else being even, those demonstrations made my choice of a local official as plain as the mask on his face.
This column originally appeared in the Las Cruces (N.M.) Sun-News.
