An April 16 incident on a Southwest Airlines flight shows the problems with mask fetishism, along with continuing evidence of the dying of common sense and the desperate need for COVID-related lawsuit protections.
I’m actually all for mask-wearing in enclosed places, but that’s not the issue. (Also, as the point here is not to bash Southwest or to litigate each specific aspect of the story as told by the passenger, but rather to make those broader points above, I have not asked Southwest for a point-by-point response to each element of that story.)
As relayed to me by passenger Heather Correia (and as partially recounted also by WPRI local news in Providence, Rhode Island,) she and her husband Victor, along with 14-year-old daughter Julianna, were traveling from their hometown of Lincoln, Rhode Island, to Tampa, where Heather’s parents live. Julianna, with severe cerebral palsy, has the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old, so wearing a mask is literally dangerous for her.
The family had flown the same route (on a different airline) at Thanksgiving when a doctor’s note sufficed for Julianna to have an exemption from the masking requirement on the flight. This time, the Correias made the reservations in February for the April 16 flight. Unbeknownst to them, the Office of Aviation Consumer Protection, within the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation, issued new guidance that took effect in mid-March, giving new leeway to airlines to impose their own policies to protect passengers against the coronavirus. Heather Correia contends that Southwest’s subsequent mask requirement violates the Air Carriers Access Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act — but even if it doesn’t violate those acts, she said the airline never proactively informed the family of the new rules.
Those rules are available but not at all easy to find (I tried) on Southwest’s website. They require (among other provisions) a specific “exemption letter” from the airline, to be secured at least seven days in advance of the flight, in order for anyone older than two years old to go maskless on a flight. A mere doctor’s note will not suffice, nor will the quite obvious reality that a child as disabled as Julianna is similarly situated to a two-year-old.
“We went through three separate checkpoints at the airport before we boarded the plane, and we asked each time if we needed anything else to go forward,” Heather Correia told me, explaining that Juliana required special assistance at the luggage check, at the gate when securing a wheelchair, and again when actually boarding. “Nobody mentioned anything about a specific exemption letter that I needed.”
It was only as the crew was about to close the plane door before takeoff that anyone asked the Correias for the “exemption letter.” The crew refused even to look at the doctor’s note that had sufficed last November. Correia says many of the other passengers spoke up in favor of the Correias as the situation developed, with some even suggesting that they take a vote, which appeared likely to be unanimous, in favor of keeping them on the flight.
No dice. The Correias were escorted off the plane by a uniformed police officer, who was then met by two more officers at the gate to escort the family from the airport.
“I was completely embarrassed,” she said. “It was humiliating. We were treated like criminals.”
The airline later issued a statement saying its policy is to communicate the policy at all airport checkpoints, but Heather Correia said that didn’t happen.
“My husband heard the agent that took us down the bridge say we made a big mistake,” she said.
The airline, through a nice customer service agent out of Dallas, did eventually reimburse the family and provided additional vouchers. Correia said that doesn’t make up for losing the time window for which the family had spent months planning the visit to Julianna’s grandparents.
“It is not easy to pack for a trip with Julianna,” Correia said. “She requires a lot of medical equipment. It’s at least a two-week process to get her ready for this.”
All of which leads back to the three conclusions mentioned earlier. First, even though masks make sense indoors, they are neither a panacea nor the only way to guard against COVID-19’s spread. They are tools, not ends in themselves. To refuse, when necessary, to improvise with auxiliary precautions is to join the “cult of the mask.” Nobody should join cults.
Second, what the Correias suffered is a perfect example of what author Philip K. Howard famously called The Death of Common Sense, whereby far too many institutions and people have let blind and brainless adherence to niggling rules replace reasonable, on-the-spot decision-making. In the Correia’s case, everybody else on the plane wore masks, the plane was sanitized and with air filters, and their daughter, as a teenager, was no more likely to be an infectious carrier of the coronavirus than the one-year-olds who are always exempt from the mask mandate.
Only the stupidest rules would not allow obviously good-faith leeway for situations such as this, and anyone failing to use reasonable discretion to apply even a strict rule shouldn’t be in that position of authority. And in the Correia’s case, there was no common sense in kicking them off the flight, much less in calling the cops to remove them from the airport entirely.
Third and finally, it is almost assuredly true that more businesses would proactively train their employees how to use discretion rather than robotic enforcement of rules beyond all reason if those businesses’ executives weren’t frightened to death of lawsuits. For a year now, conservatives have pushed for a federal law providing a lawsuit shield for businesses alleged to be responsible for random coronavirus transmission within their confines, despite reasonable business attempts to forestall such transmission. Congressional liberals blocking such a law are responsible for nightmares such as the Correias experienced.
Policymakers should not allow fear of lawsuits to mask both common sense and human decency.
