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Next week, Walmart will begin requiring all shoppers to wear a mask inside their stores. This makes Walmart the largest company yet to institute a mask policy.
Roughly sixty-five percent of all Walmart stores are already in states that have public mask requirements. However, in order to help bring things into a consistent state across all stores, the new rule will require masks in stores that are in states without public mask requirements.
This move could prove controversial. Some customers just looking to redeem deodorant spray coupons might not want to wear a mask. Resistance to masks has been a vocal minority in the US, despite CDC guidelines encouraging people to wear masks while in public. For a complicated series of reasons, some people view wearing masks as an admission of weakness or as part of some kind of conspiracy. This can bring some customers into conflict with employees who try to enforce the mask policy.
It might seem strange to some people that Walmart has waited until four months into the pandemic to issue a mask requirement. However, the move isn’t exactly surprising. Case numbers in the US continue to surge. According to recent numbers, the daily new case value is currently exceeding the numbers posted at the start of the pandemic, before any measures were being undertaken to slow the spread of the virus.
Walmart is hardly the first company to make this move, however. Costco had customers wear masks starting in May. Best Buy and Starbucks have also made similar moves in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus. As cases surge, medical experts agree that masks are a good way to reduce the person-to-person spread of the virus.
The pandemic has had a lasting effect in the US. Since lockdowns started in March, the virus has claimed over 130,000 lives. Beyond the death toll, the virus has also sickened over three million people. This has resulted in lasting lung damage in some patients. The virus is still very new: there are few therapeutic treatments for it, and there is no vaccine.
Some research labs have posted optimistic results from early vaccine trials. However, even optimistic projections hold that it could be months before a vaccine is available for the public. The safety protocols in place to ensure that a vaccine is safe are exhaustive. However, some governments have signaled that they might forego some of the normal protocols that slow vaccine development.
