Wear a mask? Even with 20,000 dead, some New Yorkers don't

NEW YORK (AP) — Eric Leventhal felt a sneeze coming and panicked.

The Brooklynite left his cloth face mask at home for a morning run in a park last week. Walking home, he turned toward an empty street and let the sneeze out, hoping no one would notice.

Too bad for him, there’s no hiding without a mask in virus-stricken New York City.

“I picked my head up and I caught eyes with a woman who was wearing a mask, an older woman,” Leventhal recalled recently. “She was just kind of shaking her head.”

Leventhal, 36, is caught in the middle of a debate over when and where, exactly, it is necessary to wear a mask in a city where COVID-19 has now claimed more than 20,000 lives.

Since April 17, everyone in New York state has been required to wear a face covering in any place where they can't stay at least 6 feet from people who don't live with them. Only children younger than 2 and people with a medical excuse are exempt.

Similar rules are in place in New Jersey and Connecticut, and were recently put in place in Massachusetts. The British government told people to start covering their mouth and nose in shops, buses and subway trains just this week.

Yet, while the rule is clear, New Yorkers have adopted their own interpretation of when masks are required.

It isn't unusual to see groups of park goers and essential workers — even police officers — leaving their masks dangling as they squeeze past people on sidewalks or chat with friends. They are perhaps most rarely used among people trying to exercise.

“Everything is fraught with life and death consequences, and it’s just hard to grapple with that at any one moment,” said Leventhal, the runner. “That’s a long way of saying, I should be wearing one, probably, but it’s difficult when you run, so I...