Mask mandates are falling in many places as the winter wave of COVID-19 cases recedes, but don’t toss that KN-95 just yet, especially if you do any traveling.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is developing guidance that will ease the nationwide mask mandate on airplanes, buses and other mass transit next month, according to a U.S. official, but the existing face covering requirement will be extended through April 18.
The requirement, which is enforced by the Transportation Security Administration, had been set to expire on March 18, but was extended by a month to allow the public health agency time to develop new, more targeted policies. The requirement extends to planes, buses, trains and transit hubs.
That wasn’t welcome news to some travelers arriving Thursday at Mineta San Jose International from Austin, Texas. Bryan Cunningham, a Gilroy health care supply company general manager, said it seems to make little sense after tens of thousands packed into SoFi Stadium for last month’s Super Bowl near Los Angeles.
“I don’t see the value in it at this point if you’re able to go everywhere else without one,” said Cunningham, 57, wearing a powder blue surgical mask while waiting for his baggage. On his flight he saw flight attendants say nothing as they walked by other passengers with their masks below their nose and mouth. “Why put a measure in place that you’re not going to enforce?”
The mask extension for transportation comes after the CDC two weeks ago changed its mask wearing guidance, which at the time urged most of the country to wear masks indoors, to allowing they were no longer needed in most areas. California dropped its general indoor mask requirement for vaccinated people Feb. 16 and for everyone March 1, and will lift its requirement for schools Saturday.
Lisa Wright, 60, a competitive runner originally from California who now lives in Texas, was frustrated with the extended mask requirement for public transportation.
“People don’t wear them right anyway,” Wright said through her cloth mask sporting an image of the U.S. Constitution’s “We the People” preamble as she grabbed her suitcase at the San Jose airport. “I’m not going to buck the system, but enough is enough.”
But others like Jim Zeng, a 50-year-old fellow Texan, weren’t bothered by the mask rule extension. A frequent traveler, he said in other parts of the world like Asia, mask wearing was common even before COVID-19.
“I have no problem wearing a mask for my own protection,” Zeng said through his blue surgical mask. “Even if they don’t ask, I still wear it. I think the masks are good for protecting people.”
Dr. Bob Wachter, who chairs the UC-San Francisco Department of Medicine, flies regularly and often shares his COVID-19 safety advice with his more than 250,000 Twitter followers, had been hoping this week that the government would extend the mask requirement.
“Unlike local regulations, flying involves mixing of people from many places,” Wachter said.
That means people in highly vaccinated San Francisco or Travis County, Tex., where the CDC currently lists transmission levels of the virus as moderate, could be seated beside someone from neighboring San Mateo County, Calif. or Burnet County, Tex., where the rate is high.
“You can’t count on your local prevalence rate to be the relevant one,” Wachter said, adding that airplanes are the kind of crowded indoor places with the potential for the virus to spread.
“There are not that many indoor settings where you may be shoulder to shoulder with people for many hours in a closed space with limited ventilation,” Wachter said.
Beyond that, although case rates continue to decline, Wachter worries about the potential for a reversal, as happened last summer and the summer before, and keeps an eye on what’s happening with the virus around the world.
“Seeing the blip up in cases in the UK makes me wonder if our season of very low prevalence will prove to be short-lived,” Wachter said.
That was on the mind of Ben Hyver of Vancouver, Washington, who had flown to San Jose for a funeral and felt that next week was too soon to lift the mask order, given past experiences with more transmissible virus variants like delta and omicron.
“Every time we start to lift the restrictions, we get a new spike,” Hyver, 21, said. “That’s what happened with omicron, it’s what happened with delta. It’s just going to extend the pandemic.”
According to the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the announcement head of time, the CDC is developing a “revised policy framework” for when masks should be required on transit systems based off its newly released “COVID-19 community levels” metric.
As of March 3 more than 90% of the U.S. population is in a location with low or medium COVID-19 Community Levels, where the CDC no longer recommends public face-masking in indoor settings. But under the CDC’s former guidance, two thirds of the U.S. are at substantial or high transmission levels of the virus that the CDC had said warrant indoor masking for everyone.
“We have to look not only at the science with regard to transmission in masks but also the epidemiology and the frequency that we may encounter a variant of concern or a variant of interest in our travel corridors,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on March 2, explaining why the agency was delaying removing the requirement for transit but allowed people to gather maskless in movie theaters and sports arenas. Source: www.mercurynews.com