Business trips won’t come back until mask mandates are no longer needed

Business trips won’t come back until mask mandates are no longer needed

by means of Gary Leff on January 22, 2022

I’m not interested in discussions about masks on airplanes. Let’s just decide

• Aircraft are safer environments than indoor congregational environments such as restaurants and bars where masks are often not needed
• But masks probably offer some protective benefit
• Although masks that meet the requirement (like cloth masks) do very little, if you want to protect yourself and others, buy a better mask

In the beginning of the pandemic, masks gave people confidence to travel, before there were vaccines and as many or equally good treatments for Covid-19. You’re close to other people, so it’s reassuring to see everyone else wearing a mask, even if you find it uncomfortable to wear it during a long day of travel.

However, Doug Parker, the outgoing CEO of American Airlines, made a point in his opening remarks to employees after finalizing the airline’s fourth-quarter call on Thursday. His comments suggested that masks hinder return business trips. The full return to normal will therefore necessarily involve the removal of the masking requirements.

dr. Fauci and other insiders of the Biden administration have argued that masks should be mandatory on airplanes forever. I have suggested that the political reality is that the requirements should be lifted before the midterm elections. Airlines, politicians and the world need to get back to normal, so there will be a drive to ‘declare victory’ over the virus.

While it’s far from guaranteed that Omicron represents the end of the pandemic, there’s a good chance it does with higher levels of background immunity, hopefully variant-specific or multivariant vaccine boosters, and highly effective treatments like Paxlovid.

Here’s how Parker explained masks – an ongoing requirement due to the virus wave – and how it affects business travel (emphasis mine),

We need business trips to get back to where it was. It wants… every time it looks like the world is going back to normal, business travel starts to increase and it starts to go up pretty quickly – like it did in July, like it started in November.

What happened though anything that gets people to where we all have to wear masks again, and for companies that haven’t put people back to work yet, they’re putting that off. It has been postponed again for many companies in the United States. It comes back, and when it does business again, and [we’ll be profitable].

Masks are a stand-in for normality here. Parker normally sees around the corner. Of course, last month he had to return a suggestion to Congress that masks are not necessary on airplanes.

Personally, I think masks are fine, but let’s not pretend they do more than they do. I wanted to wear them during the flu season before all this because I don’t want to get sick, I have too much to do before the forced down time. And while I don’t like masks, I don’t hate them either. They are mild inconvenience and mild public health benefits, ultimately a distraction from repairing our institutions that let us down during the pandemic, such as FDA and CDC, and from doubling down on testing, vaccines, and treatment.

More of a view from the wing