COVID Mask Wearing: Identity and Materiality

Slick data visualizations and authoritative daily tallies of infection and death statistics allow us to know the COVID-19 pandemic as a global phenomenon, but the local variabilities remain confounding. In the United States and Europe one of the fundamental questions asked throughout the COVID-19 pandemic—immediately after the question “How did things get so bad?”—is the question “How did countries in Asia manage it so well?” Some generalizations seem obvious. While Americans waited anxiously for guidance from the federal government in mid-March of 2020, news reports from abroad showed the empty Wuhan highways, South Koreans lined up for nasal swab tests, and Singaporeans downloading contact tracing apps on their phones (Goggin 2020; Lee and Lee 2020; Taylor 2020). The most universal image was that of people wearing face masks to slow the spread of infection. East Asian countries were taking aggressive countermeasures while Donald Trump was promising that the “China Plague” would simply go away, “like a miracle.” By 31 December 2020, a year after the first case of COVID-19 was reported by the World Health Organization, the United States reported 352,998 COVID deaths and Italy counted 74,159 dead, while South Korea reported 900 deaths, 29 in Singapore, and 7 deaths were reported in Taiwan. To what do we owe these differences? Are these variabilities tied to the competency of elected officials, or to investments in national health systems? Perhaps the differences have more to do with hard-to-measure historical trajectories, qualitative data points that evade crisp delineation on a COVID-tracking digital dashboard. Grasping for explanations, some Western journalists and politicians dug up and