People on my Substack blog have noticed that I have been re-sharing posts about COVID and masking. They may be wondering what this has to do with being an Eco-Pagan. Well, now I will tell you. The truth is that I never stopped wearing a COVID mask because the pandemic never ended.
When did the pandemic end?
Where do I start in explaining this? Let me start by engaging in a little bit of a thought exercise: Ask yourself when did the COVID pandemic “officially end?” Try to think when that moment was. Do you remember?
Did it end in May 2023, when World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that COVID-19 no longer constituted “a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).” No, it didn’t. They changed the status because because by 2023 it no longer met the “extraordinary event” criterion… This was because COVID wasn’t new anymore. As a result, the WHO recommended shifting to long-term management of COVID-19.
Was it over when eight Democratic Party governors put an end to mask mandates in February 2022? It made no sense to me at the time. The Omicron surge had yet to end. It had the highest number of cases and deaths ever recorded up to the pandemic at that point. There were still an alarmingly high 200,000 cases per day. Maybe it’s because seven of those states had gubernatorial elections coming up.
Was it when Joe Biden unilaterally declared that the pandemic was over in September, 2022? In the month prior there were more than 2,000,000 new cases of COVID and 12,700 deaths. Dr. Megan Ranney, the dean of Brown University School of Public Health said, “We have vaccines & infection-induced immunity. We have treatments. We have tests (while they last). The fatality rate is way down. And so we respond to it differently. But [is the pandemic] over?! With 400 deaths a day?! I call malarkey.”
The fact of the matter is that this “end of the COVID pandemic” was manufactured and it has never ended.
Manipulating the data
Almost since the beginning of the pandemic, people have been putting their thumb on the scale that measures the progress of ending the pandemic. There were goalposts we were supposed to reach in order to properly scale back protective measures. My own area went through a cycle of letting go of mask requirements only to reinstate them–twice I think.. You’d think the lesson they’d learn from this is that they should stick to actual science.
Here is one example of how a local Chamber of Commerce got the public health department to loosen COVID restrictions, in direct contradiction to the benchmarks outlined in a plan the county was supposedly following. A month before the CDC said that people didn’t need to mask if they were vaccinated, the CDC drew criticism for quietly stopping the monitoring of people who got COVID despite getting the COVID vaccine. The vaccine had only been out for a couple of months at that point.
Yes, manipulating the data was another useful tool. In the spring of 2022, the CDC changed their definitions of what constituted high, medium and low levels of transmission. What had been previously “high” and “medium” were now “low,” for the most part.
So COVID never went away. It is less lethal for now than it was in 2020, but it’s still very disabling. And it’s much more contagious.
COVID ruins lives.
The more you get COVID-19, the more susceptible you are to future infections.–and not just COVID. A 2022 study said that ““The risk of death, hospitalization and serious health issues from COVID-19 jumps significantly with reinfection compared with a first bout with the virus, regardless of vaccination status.” Many patient advocates and medical experts have referred to COVID as “airborne AIDS,” This is not because the viruses are the same or that the mechanisms are identical, but both can linger in the body and cause immune deficiency.
A meta-analysis of multiple studies from 2025 revealed that over 20% of people diagnosed with COVID develop Long COVID symptoms. Some go away over time, some don’t. But the risk of getting Long COVID increases with every infection.
One of the most horrifying aspects of COVID is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), formerly known as “chronic fatigue syndrome,” and to be honest, “fatigue” is an understatement. A 2025 study showed an eightfold increase in the number of current cases, and a fifteen-fold jump in new cases, and this is associated with COVID-19. I personally know people with Long COVID who are dealing with this. In the worst cases, people are bed-bound and cannot take care of themselves. Worse, there is no diagnostic test for either ME or Long COVID, and many It is often hard to get diagnosed with either condition as many physicians will not diagnose the condition, and many patients will be told that it’s in their own heads.
This article from Mayo Clinic summarizes other risks from Long COVID. You. Don’t. Want. This.
One in five odds of Long COVID, with the odds increasing with every reinfection, is worrisome odds for me. So I’m among a number of people who never stopped masking.
But a COVID mask?
A lot of societies have blind spots. One of the ones built into Western society is “germ transmission is good.” The assumption behind this thinking is that if you catch something, you build resistance to it, and it makes your immune system stronger. But this mindset creates problems.
Back in the late 2000s, I was in a relationship with a woman six states away and I had plane tickets to see her in a few weeks. I was nervous that a co-worker with a phleghmy cough would get me sick and ruin my trip. This felt patently unfair, and it seemed ridiculous that masks weren’t considered socially acceptable when it could save so much trouble.
Wearing a protective face mask has not been unusual in many East Asian societies.. As one Japanese professor put it, ““Rather than asking why people in East Asia are wearing masks, we should ask the people in the West why they did not wear them until recently and why some of them resist it. Japanese people have been doing it for a century!”
Public health leader initially promoted cloth masks in 2020 because there were shortages of PPE available to health care workers. Czechia found early success in this approach. In early 2022, the CDC said that N95 and KN95 masks were the best for protecting against COVID, though they continued to encourage other masks. Many COVID-conscious people were wearing N95s before that.
Besides, masks can be fun accessories. And masks can also be dressed up with their own accessories. Through masking, not only does a whole new world of self-protection open up, but also a new world of self-expression.
But why talk about COVID masks on a Pagan blog?
Paganism, like any spiritual path, has elements of lifestyle and ethics within it. My lifestyle, for example, includes daily prayers to my deities, as well as regular ceremonies marking the cycles of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. As an eco-Pagan, part of my tuning in with the Earth includes minimizing my impact on her.
As a Pagan, I am participating in community care, not only by protecting myself but protecting others from infection. In essence, I see our society as needing to catch up with the ethics of collective well-being many East Asian societies practice. When the COVID pandemic hit, and the anti-mask movements began to spring up as a reaction to public health measures, I could clearly see how the need to think about your neighbor and the hyper-individualistic society we live in were clashing.
Indeed I see clear connections between COVID denialism and climate denialism. Both forms of denialism pretends that what we humans do to the Earth or to each other has no real impact. It calls into question the way that certain “freedoms” exercised by certain individuals impinge on other basic freedoms–the right to live in a world that is safe for us and for the Earth’s creatures.
I am also heartened by what appears to be an emerging distinct COVID-conscious subculture that looks to embrace the reality of today as a means of creating the future we want. Instead of doomerism, we accept the challenges that today gives us, deal with them in a realistic way. As the activist UMNIA wrote in her guest essay about this subculture, “They should learn what the COVID Conscious community already knows: Acknowledging that risk and harm can actually liberate us.”
COVID-conscious culture is Pagan culture. You can try to change my mind on this, but I’m not budging.