What a pleasure to breathe freely.
For eight months now, England has been open. No mask mandates, no limits on gatherings, no restrictions. Last week, even the requirement to self-isolate if you test positive was rescinded. Other than the awesome determination of public sector workers not to return to their desks, we are back to normal.
Except for one thing: International travel remains needlessly painful, expensive, and bureaucratic. Unless we do something about it now, I have a nasty feeling it will stay that way forever.
Last week, I flew to Argentina. I paid for a speedy lateral flow test, but the lab lost my sample, meaning that I had to tear around in a panic on the morning of the flight. I got a second test on the way to the airport, only to be told that it was not enough because Argentina required a PCR test. I assured the check-in lady that the regulations had changed, but she was having none of it. I came within minutes of missing the flight, all because, it turned out, she hadn’t scrolled down to the bottom of her tablet where the new rule was listed.
Then, when you board a plane, you are back in a world of face masks, the efficacy of which was always ambiguous. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other public health authorities initially argued that they were at best useless and at worst actively harmful, harboring bacteria. They switched their advice, not on the basis of new evidence — the previous advice rested on decades of accumulated data — but because, in desperation, they wanted to tug every lever. Two years on, the data are clear that vaccines work and nonpharmaceutical interventions, including masks, make almost no difference.
You might think that planes are a special category. Crowding a lot of people into a metal tube, breathing recycled air, might seem like creating a smorgasbord for viruses. But, counterintuitively, aircraft turn out to be the least infectious of all enclosed spaces. Because of the face masks? Hardly. People take them off to tuck in to their horrible pretzels. Seasoned travelers know how to stretch out their coffee to keep their mask off for most of the journey.
No, the real explanation is the filtration system that constantly purifies the air. It’s a myth that cabin air is recycled — most of it is sucked in from outside, with less than 30% retained to keep the pressure constant. That 30% goes through a filtration system that any hospital would be proud of, with a 99.99% rate of eliminating viral and bacterial fragments. It is this system rather than mask-wearing, as Gary Kelly, chief executive of Southwest Airlines, told Congress, that prevents infection.
So, why not scrape the last restrictions away from their airborne redoubt? After all, the rationale for the controls, to keep uninfected countries safe from infected ones, no longer applies. The omicron variant has swept the globe, bringing with it an acquired immunity that reaches even the vaccine refuseniks. Rules that were rushed in when parts of the world hoped to keep the disease at bay are utterly redundant.
Sadly, rules on airline security have only the mildest acquaintance with logic. Sixteen years have passed since the unsuccessful bomb plot that resulted in tighter hand luggage limits and a ban on liquids and gels. It is theoretically possible that liquids could be used to make explosives, but that is just as true in nightclubs, shopping malls, and airport security queues, now made longer and potentially more lethal by the requirement to check for liquids.
Twenty-one years have passed since a low-grade crook called Richard Reid took his shoe off on a flight from Paris to Miami and tried unsuccessfully to light it with matches. It proved impossible, but that hasn’t stopped the authorities from making us take our shoes off every time we pass through security.
These measures have almost nothing to do with safety. Rather, they rest on producer-capture (people’s jobs depend on them) and on inertia. (Who wants to risk repealing them, however minimal the chances of a future attack?) And so we carry on with our pre-flight rituals, knowing that they serve no purpose, and degrading ourselves ever so slightly each time we participate in the lie.
Masks take the pretense to a new level. While shoes and liquids could still theoretically be dangerous, masks serve no purpose beyond soothing the nervous. Back in September, this column urged President Joe Biden to scrap the idiotic ban on British travelers, imposed before the virus had reached the United States. The following day, he did. Here’s hoping for a similar result this time.
