Masks: Is America done with Covid mandates?
“The plane had only just reached cruising altitude when the pilot made the announcement,” said Julia Reinstein and Katie Camero in BuzzFeed News. A federal judge in Florida last week struck down the Center for Disease Control’s mask mandate, meaning that passengers were no longer required to wear them on airplanes, trains, and buses. Some jubilant passengers “ripped off their face coverings, cheering the change.” But it was grim news for the 8 million–plus Americans who are immunocompromised or have health conditions that leave them especially vulnerable to Covid. For them, the end of pandemic precautions means a loss of freedom. It was a ludicrous ruling, said Steven Lubet in NBCNews .com, and rested “almost entirely on a tortured misreading of one word, ‘sanitation.’” Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle—a 35-year-old Trump appointee who was rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association—ruled that masks may “trap virus droplets,” but do not “clean” anything and therefore are not sanitation. Under that absurd logic, the CDC wouldn’t be allowed to enforce a regulation against “defecating on an airplane floor”—and could only require “wiping up afterward.”
The reason passengers broke into applause, said National Review in an editorial, is that they were celebrating our “mutual liberation” from Covid theater. When people weren’t wearing masks below their noses, they were pulling them down to eat or drink. What’s the point in that? Commercial airplanes, moreover, have superb air circulation and filtering, and by now, “the vast majority of travelers” are vaccinated and/or have had a previous Covid infection. People put up with masks as a “temporary” emergency measure when we had no vaccines and hospitals were overwhelmed, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. But hospitalizations and deaths have plunged. “If not now, when?”
Have we not learned anything from the past two years? said Dr. Arnold Barnett in The Hill. This isn’t the first time we thought we were done with Covid—only to be hit by another debilitating surge. “Vaccine effectiveness is waning,” and a new Omicron subvariant known as BA.2 has caused new cases to jump 70 percent since the end of March. We also need to consider the debilitating risks of long Covid, which can follow even mild infections, and the possible emergence of a new, more dangerous variant. Besides, planes aren’t as safe as some might contend; peer-reviewed studies have shown infected passengers transmitting Covid to 15 people on one flight and 14 on another. But in our collective pandemic fatigue, said Kent Sepkowitz in CNN.com, people are “embracing the magical thinking that, by ignoring the virus, it will go away.”
It won’t, but we need to be realistic, said David Leonhardt in The New York Times. The mask mandate on public transportation didn’t require the N95 and KN95 masks that are proven to work, and was so poorly enforced and had so many exceptions that “many Americans understandably questioned its worth.” At this stage of the pandemic, it makes more sense to encourage people who fear Covid to voluntarily wear N95 masks; experts say oneway masking works. Whether we like it or not, there is strong, growing resistance to mask mandates, and “the best responses to health crises depend on triage.” Public officials should give priority to Covid precautions that people will accept and follow, rather than trying to enforce the unenforceable.