Everywhere we turn, pandemic mandates are falling. Only a handful of states and a few handfuls of large American cities have indoor mask mandates left. Public schools are slowly dropping them. Even Canada is starting to relax some of its stringent testing cross-border requirements, though don’t go honking to celebrate.
Are air travel and other forms of public transportation next? That could take some time to rev up.
“The TSA face mask requirement is scheduled to end on March 18, 2022,” Chelsea Boyd, a research fellow with the R Street Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “However, it could be extended again.”
Boyd said she believes that “federal mask mandates for transportation will likely end when the federal public health emergency designation expires.”
When will that federal health emergency order expire?
“There’s some pressure to allow it to expire sooner rather than later. However, predicting exactly when the administration will deem the emergency period over is anyone’s guess,” Boyd explained.
That emergency period is set to run through April 16, “although they could terminate it early or renew it,” Boyd said.
The decision, either way, is likely to be a highly political one.
“I imagine the White House will be closely watching the polls as it weighs rescinding the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] mask order,” said Marc Scribner, a transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation.
Gary Leff, the author of the influential View From the Wing website, agreed.
“The administration needs to declare victory on the virus,” Leff told the Washington Examiner. “They’re cautious about doing this, out of fear of being proven wrong by events. But this has to be their story heading into the midterms with both houses of Congress in the balance.”
That’s the bet for people willing to put money on it as well.
“Betting markets currently give a 72% chance that masks on planes will be gone before the election,” Leff said.
He said his “personal guess,” without money attached, “is that we see one more extension beyond March … perhaps a two-month extension, and then the rules sunset for summer.”
However, the public health bureaucracy may have to be dragged into it.
“Public health folks would love to see masks forever,” Leff said. “They see infection risk all around us, and not from COVID. And they see masks as low cost. In much the same way, they’d love to see handshakes gone forever, and that was true pre-pandemic as well.”
The reason that mandates are likely to persist longer on planes, trains, and buses is not about science but power, according to Leff.
“Mask rules on planes, though, have never been about the science. Cloth masks aren’t super effective, and planes are lower-risk environments than other indoor congregant settings like bars,” he said. “Instead, transportation was the area the administration believed they had the greatest likelihood of legal authority.”
Public transportation had less legal standing to push back, and many stakeholders have other COVID-19-driven priorities.
The trade association Airlines for America is worrying about other things than masks. A coalition letter that it spearheaded in early February urged the government to “remove the requirement for pre-departure testing for vaccinated passengers traveling to the United States.”
The airline trade association did not respond to inquiries from the Washington Examiner about masking policies.
At roughly the same time, the American Bus Association was lobbying the government not to stop masking rules but for a bailout.
ABA President Peter J. Pantuso wrote an op-ed for the Washington Business Journal urging Congress “to provide COVID relief money to those in the bus industry who are doing everything they can to keep their family businesses afloat.”
At present, the CDC is “not quite ready to give up on masks,” warned biology doctoral student Daniel Nuccio in an article for the American Conservative magazine. “Anthony Fauci has even suggested in the past that masks on planes may never go away and mandatory vaccines for domestic air travel should be considered.”
Yet even Nuccio conceded that the science is likely to follow the politics of COVID-19 before too long.
