It seems unthinkable that in the United States, which has passed the sinister milestone of half a million deaths from Covid-19, a company would ban its employees from wearing masks.
However, this happened less than a year ago in one of the largest supermarket chains in Florida, when the coronavirus spread around the world and terror began to strike.
At the time, Gerardo Gutiérrez, 70, was working in a Publix supermarket branch in Miami Beach.
He died in late April after contracting the coronavirus in March, that horrific month in which the pandemic was declared, in which Italy ended up in a national confinement that caused sedation in the West and in which the dead in the United States still number in the hundreds.
“We were all in a panic by now,” recalls his daughter Ariane, the prosecutor in a civil case against Publix for wrongful death.
There, he claims that a colleague who worked very close to Gutiérrez had a cough and other symptoms of the virus, but then Publix forbade his employees to wear masks because “they didn’t want to scare customers.”
“As a result, my father passed away,” the daughter told AFP at her Miami Beach home. “She’d gone to work every day without a mask or gloves, and they weren’t allowed to wear them.”
On March 23, Miami Beach was the first Florida city to order the closure and close the beaches.
But Publix waited until the first week of April to allow its employees to voluntarily wear masks, the lawsuit said.
The policy change came late for Gutiérrez, who was already very ill. He was hospitalized on April 10 and was discharged from Zoom by his friends and family on April 28. He died that day.
“He loved swimming. He was very active, very vital. He could have lived for many more years,” Ariane says, showing photos of the Cuban father.
Two weeks ago, a judge rejected a request from the supermarket chain to treat the complaint as workers’ compensation and not a lawsuit. The company did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
We keep paying
In early March, Miami Beach was still in the middle of its most touristy season. It’s the time when students across the country take spring break and celebrate their childhood on Florida beaches like there’s no tomorrow.
Much was said at the time about the inconvenient party atmosphere of this island off the coast of Miami, when much of the country first adopted social distance rules – a term hitherto unknown.
“People are slow to pay attention,” Ariane Gutiérrez recalls. “And we’re still not over it.”
That month, businesses closed, shelves were cleared, and mask shortages became dangerous. For this reason, health authorities initially did not recommend its use to the general public to ensure that medical personnel had adequate supplies.
“That message at the start of the pandemic was a major strategic public health mistake,” Purnima Madhivanan, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, told AFP.
Additionally, in a way that troubled health workers and scientists, the mask became a political statement because Donald Trump, who was president, refused to wear it for months. Sometimes he even teased those who did.
“Those mixed messages confuse people,” says the epidemiologist. And we keep paying for it. Masks are essential. ‘
Living with COVID
One of the lessons from these episodes, according to the expert, is that “as much as we would like to say that science triumphs, science is only as good as the messengers who communicate it.”
A January study from the University of Southern California found that a large majority (between 80 and 90%) of Americans believe wearing masks is an effective way to protect against COVID-19, but only half of them uses them consistently.
This shows that “knowledge does not necessarily turn into behavior,” Madhivanan complains.
Initially, it was thought that warm weather killed the virus, that shopping bags needed to be sanitized, that race was a factor – it turns out that inequality was the factor – and many, like Gutiérrez, suffered the damage of the disinformation.
Some things have changed (who continues to disinfect tomato cans?), But others, such as the use of masks, should become as “normalized” in the West as it is in Asian countries, the epidemiologist warns.
“We will have to live with the covid,” he says. “There will never be a time when we can say the covid will be gone. We just have to learn to deal with it, like the flu.”