A Trump-nominated federal judge invalidated the nation wide mask mandates on airplanes and other forms of mass transportation on Monday, abruptly ending a nearly two year policy.
Several airlines – including United, Delta, Alaska, American, Southwest, and JetBlue – quickly announced that passengers could fly without a face covering. Other large transportation systems – like the New York City subway – are still requiring them.
Reactions have been mixed. Several viral videos show passengers – notified about the new policy mid-flight – cheering and ostentatiously throwing out their masks.
“No one’s any happier than we are,” said a flight attendant in a video filmed on an international Delta flight.
“I feel that it’s pretty much up to the individual, if they don’t feel safe, they should wear a mask. And if you feel comfortable traveling without a mask, you should have the freedom to do so,” one woman, who said she’ll continue to wear a mask on public transit, told CNN.
But other Americans – particularly the immunocompromised and families with small children who cannot receive vaccines – are concerned for their health and safety.
The New York Times reports:
For her part, Ms. Tansley felt a jolt of fear and alarm. She was with her two children, a 4-year-old and an 8-month-old, both too young to be vaccinated, the baby too young for a mask. She was on her way to a work meeting involving a colleague with a rare autoimmune disease, and her family had undergone P.C.R. tests because they were worried about potentially infecting him.
“I was scared — all I could do was hope it’s going to be OK,” she said. “There wasn’t any other option.”
Ms. Tansley said her family hadn’t been on a flight since Christmas 2019 out of concern about the virus. She has asthma, and said she wasn’t sure whether she would go ahead with her work meetings, or what her family would do about their return flight home on April 25.
“It’s not that the mask mandate has changed that upset me, it’s that we boarded the plane under one set of rules, and made a decision as a family and as a work group,” said Ms. Tansley, a television producer and former Broadway performer. “The decision was made for us midflight.”
Andy Slavitt, who once ran the Biden administration’s response to COVID-19, criticized the airlines for failing to prioritize the health of their passengers. “They don’t want responsibility for a public health decision. ‘If you want us to do it, force us so we don’t get the blame.’ They don’t believe they should have to take actual responsibility for people’s health on their planes. So if not forced, they run,” he wrote on Twitter.
Slavitt added that airlines faced a lot of pressure from their flight attendants. “Enforcing mask requirements was extremely unpopular with them,” he wrote. “And it’s hard to blame them. The ability of a very small number of people to be uncivil rules the day here. Score one for the mob.”
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA President Sara Nelson urged passengers to continue to wear masks if they are sick.
“I think if there’s anything we’ve learned from this [pandemic], it has to be about common courtesy,” Nelson said.
“This is not about extending this mask policy. It’s more about how we’re recognizing that we’re looking out for each other and not bringing our own problems or viruses to other people knowingly.”
CNN provides key context:
Cases are increasing in more than half of the 50 states. But Covid-19 hospitalizations are close to their lowest level since the government began tracking that metric in July of 2020. As the use of at-home tests rises, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has warned that there is potentially a huge undercount of cases because those results often don’t get reported. They estimate that only about 7% of positive cases in the US are being detected — suggesting that the case rates are 14.5 times higher than reported.
