News reports (NPR, e.g.) have the Biden admin going cautiously on whether to appeal or not. They say they want to be careful not to get adverse decision that will tie CDC’s hands in future. I figured appeal would be a no-brainer, especially considering slipshod ruling. I wonder if political considerations are behind the slow-roll.
It’s a mid-term election year, and the administration’s party is already at a disadvantage.
My personal trainer has covid today. She caught it from her 3 year old, who caught it on the airplane when they returned home from visiting family. At least, no one in the visited family caught covid, and they didn’t go out anywhere, and she flew back the day after the mask mandate was lifted, and while her family wore masks, 3 year olds don’t wear masks especially well.
The 3 year old has recovered. The vaccinated 6 year old never tested positive. My trainer and her wife are pretty sick, though. Not “hospitalized” sick, but “can’t work and feel horrible” sick.
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It’s unprovable, but if it could be proven I would bet a large amount of money that 3yo caught it in the airport, or on the jet bridge, or the bus from the parking lot / rental car facility to the airport, or the tram that goes around the airport, not the airplane.
Hope your trainer & his family are fully recovered soon though, and that you continue to avoid it.
Yeah, those places were all mostly masked when her family made plans, and suddenly became unmasked when they were about to go home. She’s kind of pissy about it.
Thanks. They are both youngish and healthy, so their odds are good. And i see her over video, so my risk of catching anything from her is approximately zero. But of course i have other risks in my life.
Responding to a mask sidebar in the bullying thread:
Honestly, I’m not certain.
Last summer, a few weeks after my wife and I got our second shots, we finally ventured out a long road trip from New England to the southern US, to go visit my father (who had to be moved twice during the pandemic, from independent living to memory care to full nursing care in his retirement community) and my mother-in-law (who had a stroke while the world was locked down). I reported on my observations in one of the COVID threads here…but essentially, the further we got away from New England / the “redder” the area we were in, the fewer masks we saw being worn, and the less comfortable we were wearing masks.
The most memorable part of that experience was at one stop in rural western Tennessee, where one “gentleman” yelled at us for wearing masks, demanding that we get our masks “out of there” “or else”.
I’d chalk that particular incident to mental illness, manifesting through some crazy political sentiment (similar to how it is uncomfortable to have different political views in certain locales) and subscription to the various conspiracy theories and other nuttiness that we’ve seen in public discourse on COVID.
However, we did receive stink eyes elsewhere during that trip and subsequent travel (I felt most unwelcome masking in eastern Washington and northern Idaho a couple of months ago), and I have had the experience of being asked to unmask in one store (a local gun shop) because of the proprietors’ preferences.
I will admit that I haven’t personally seen/experienced analogous behavior of pro-mask folks towards non-masked individuals…but I am still more of a homebody than I was in the Before Times (although thankfully not the strict isolation my wife and I maintained between mid-March '20 until three weeks after we got our second shots). But I infer, from what I’ve read, that there are a few incidents of such craziness.
I know a person who works in an ice cream shop. Several maskless customers would make it a point to walk behind the covid plastic barrier between the customer and employee to hand them payment just to be a jackass. this was a regular occurrence.
I live in Manhattan where you’re a lot less likely to get harassed for wearing a mask, but in red areas, I’d be afraid of being harassed.
I think it’s a false equivalence to compare asking people to wear a mask to asking them to remove a mask. A mask is just an article of clothing, and being asked to wear one in a specific place for a specific time is just not a big deal. I’ve been asked to cover my hair, to wear a long skirt rather than pants or shorts, to wear long sleeves, to wear shoes, to wear a suit… at various times, and I’ve always complied and never felt especially put upon. But I’d be pretty upset if i was asked to undress in public, and i think it generally is harassment when Muslim women are told to remove their hijab, or Sikh men to remove their turban.
I suppose I’ve been asked to remove my dirty outdoor shoes in Japanese buildings, but I’ve been provided with clean indoor shoes that quite adequately protect my feet. (And I’ve had hospitals request that I wear their clean mask for similar reasons.)
What do people expect to see as a result of the airlines not requiring masks? Will cases go up considerably? It may be expected that US cases increase at this point because cases have levelled off and are more likely to increase than decrease.
Anyway, if cases do not rise, will “pro-mask” folks be persuaded that masks at this time (May 1) should not be required?
I have been surprised that COVID-19 did not spread like wildfire from airplane travel even when masks were required. Did the airlines perform wonders with air filtration, did requiring masks simply reduce talking (and therefore aerosols), did people not travel when knowingly sick, and/or were masks the primary reason for the control of COVID-19? Other/combination?
I am definitely not anti-mask. My freedom to not wear a mask stops when there is a pandemic, and especially when hospitalizations are at dangerous levels. This seems like beyond common sense. But I have had difficulty following the government/CDC lead as their focus has been on reducing deaths (at any cost) at the expense of “harder to measure” emotional/psychological/developmental impacts.
Honestly, I am personally a lot more worried about the end of the mask mandate on subways, buses, and commuter rail than on airplanes. Except for boarding and exiting, airplanes have decent filtration.
The data is going to be messy enough that it’s unlikely either side will be persuaded by data.
This is a reasonable argument against masks in schools. There’s really not a lot of developmental/psychological cost to wearing masks on transit. How much were you expecting to interact with that guy across the aisle, anyway? On crowded subways, people go to some effort to ignore the people nearby them. It reduces the sense of stress from being over-crowded. Masks might make that easier.
Anyway, there’s a lot of covid around. I know, because a lot of my friends are out with covid, and a lot more are “close contacts”. I’m supposed to go to a graduation thing on Tuesday, and I think 1/3 of the people we are honoring are going to be out with covid. (split about equally between those who are sick and those who are just quarantining.) Cases leapt when the local mask mandate ended. That was concurrent with the onset of BA2, so it might be a coincidence.
I’m a pro-mask person who wishes masks had been accepted as normal daily wear in part because of the impact to the transmission of respiratory illnesses in general (e.g. all those cases of “it’s just a cold” that people won’t stay home for)…but I accept that mine is a minority view.
I think we’re “done” with mask mandates in non-medical settings in the US, even if/when there are further COVID waves, at least as long as vaccination and prior cases continue to provide sufficient protection from COVID to not cause medical systems to be overwhelmed. The mob has spoken, and it doesn’t want to mask…and politicians tend not to ignore the mob in election years.
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I agree that the mob has spoken. I can still be sad, and think the mob has been misled. Even if I expect politicians to respect the mob.
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I’m at the airport now, waiting to board a flight (despite the airline’s attempts to kill this trip with flight cancellations and delays).
Maybe 10% of the people in this blue-land terminal are masked. I’m in a definite minority wearing mine, but am not uncomfortably unique.
.
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And now I’m sitting in a restaurant attached to a tribal casino in a very red locale. I’m having flashbacks to my stop at a Walmart outside Birmingham AL during my first post-vaccination roadtrip last year - all the fair-skinned people I’ve seen on property are unmasked, while most of the POC are masked.
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planning to fly next saturday. gonna wear a mask for sure.
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Are those people also employees? mainly/generally speaking?
I was recently in a place where nearly all of the tourists were unmasked and many of the working folk waiting on all of us annoying tourists were masked.
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I assume that they were mostly employees - I suspect the casino is a major employer for residents of the reservation - but I cannot say for certain they all were.
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during my spa vacation, almost all the vacationers were maskless. with the staff it was mixed. way more staff were wearing masks than visitors. just makes a vacation less fun to wear a mask the entire time. when i was there last year it was required for everyone and it kinda sucked.
So, I’m flying again today (short trip), this time departing from a major airport in a blue metro area in a purple state. Maybe 5% of travelers masked, and perhaps 10-25% of employees.
Sadly, the person in my gate area who has a nasty productive-sounding cough isn’t masked. Hopefully he won’t give me a mutated monkeypox or something.
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I think wearing an n95 all day in the office is giving me headaches, will have to pare back to a surgical.