On the other side of the sprayground, Katie, who declined to give her last name, also had her mask off. She was sitting with a group of close friends she felt safe around, cradling her baby daughter and watching her two-year-old son run through the splash zone.
Her feelings about masks, and about changing COVID-19 rules, are complicated.
“That whole not having it mandated anymore thing is really stupid,” she said, referring to the CDC guidance. “I think it’s going to actually cause more people not to be as cautious and think that the pandemic’s over, and then we’re going to have a spike again.”
Katie lives in Mount Airy. She got COVID-19 while she was pregnant with her daughter, an experience she says was horrible and left her with lingering lung problems. She’s not vaccinated against the virus yet because she’s nervous about how quickly the shots were approved, and so she wears masks indoors and on public transportation. She’s a regular bus rider, and hates the idea of other unvaccinated people going without them in stores and other indoor spaces.
“People don’t want to feel uncomfortable,” she said. “But the thing is, do you want to be comfortable or do you want to be sick?”
Mackenzie Warren, a 28-year-old South Philly resident, says masks have taken on an even bigger significance for her. Even though she’s fully vaccinated and not particularly worried about her own safety, she’s still wearing them pretty much every time she leaves her house, inside and outside.
For one thing, she says she doesn’t want anyone to perceive her as being careless. And like Galen, the library worker, she views it as a symbol of her own left-leaning politics.
“Because of the [political] discourse that’s been going on and the crazy polarization about it, masks, I think, are a visual representation of your personal politics and your personal morals,” she said.
Sequoia Medley, another South Philly resident, has recently been realizing she’s also thinking about masks in political terms.
“There was a period of time during the pandemic where if you saw someone with their mask around their chin, or not wearing it, you knew where they stood,” she said.
For the past year, Medley has devoted a lot of her attention to homeschooling her two kids. They are five and six, still too young to be vaccinated, and while she acknowledges that they’re unlikely to get seriously ill from COVID-19, she doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks.
Over the past year, she has relied heavily on her friends and neighbors being diligent about masks in order to feel safe. In general, it has worked. Most of the people she interacts with are like her: liberal and cautious about COVID, habitual mask-wearers.
Now she feels that era of the pandemic coming to an end, and she’s seeing evidence of the changes every day. She has been frustrated, she said, because she feels like CDC, state and city guidance gloss over the fact that people have young unvaccinated kids, and don’t want to put their health in the hands of unmasked strangers in the grocery store.
But with more and more people walking around with faces uncovered in her East Passyunk neighborhood, she’s gradually learning to recalibrate her expectations.
“I think maybe it’s a good thing because it was getting very easy to get tribal and reactionary and feel as though there were sides when you’re dealing with germs,” she said. “But it’s disquieting, because I think a lot of people gained a lot of mistrust in every direction through this pandemic.”
