Here's What I Don't Understand

On April 13, the CDC extended its airline and transit mask mandate for another 15 days, until May 3.

The decision was made in response to the increasing spread of the omicron subvariant in the U.S. and an increase in the 7-day moving average of cases, which have risen by around 25% over the last two weeks nationally. Certain states are seeing much larger increases in new cases.

The CDC is following the science with this latest decision, says James Hodge, who directs the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University.

"I believe that a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully," he says. "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections — that's not responsible and that's counter to the public's health."

However, there has been growing pressure on the Biden administration to lift the mask rule.

This in itself is contradictory: the reasons the public health expert quoted above gives for extending the mandate is "a two-week period is just enough to say we're watching very carefully". This sounds a lot like mom and dad saying a two-week period for being grounded is just enough to send a message, or something like that. But in the next sentence, he says, "If we pull this mask mandate, we will have extended numbers of infections," which is different -- they're not just sending a message, they're keeping us from getting sick.

But the problem continues to be that while omicron is more contagious, it's not more fatal. People keep piping up that maybe the CDC should be using a metric other than "cases" if that's so, and the CDC never quite gets around to making the change. It keeps sounding more and more as if mom and dad want us to stay grounded but won't say why.

So in the middle of this 15-day extension of an extension. a federal judge throws out the whole mask mandate as unconstitutional. The airlines, which wanted to get rid of it, announced the decision in the middle of flights in the air, and passengers cheered, applauded, and threw their masks in the trash bags. The administration dithered and sent the decision on whether to appeal the judge's ruling to the CDC, which decided yes, it would ask the Justice Department to appeal. According to CNN,

The Justice Department on Wednesday appealed a ruling by a federal judge that struck down the mask mandate for mass transportation, following a recommendation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It is CDC's continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health," the CDC said in a statement. "CDC will continue to monitor public health conditions to determine whether such an order remains necessary. CDC believes this is a lawful order, well within CDC's legal authority to protect public health."

. . . The appeal means that the administration will head to a higher court to extend the mandate -- despite the fact that many airlines and public transit systems have already decided to make masks optional following the court ruling.

The Justice Department's appellate filings didn't immediately include a request for a stay seeking to put the court order on hold and reinstate the mask mandate, a standard move in emergency circumstances.

My sense is that even at the CDC, someone understood that enforcing the reinstated mandate would be seen by some large part of the population as arbitrary and would be met at minimum by large-scale disobedience, if not by renewed disturbances on airlines. In fact, nearly all the airlines and agencies that announced they would no longer enforce the mandate immediately following the judge's order have continued their policies of non enforcment after the CDC's reinstatement. (Yesterday my Facebook friend posted another maskless selfie on Metrolink, despite "Dr" Ferrer's order that Metrolink resume enforcing the mandate.) Indeed, CDC or no,

“With masks now optional, Delta will restore flight privileges for customers on the mask non-compliance no-fly list only after each case is reviewed and each customer demonstrates an understanding of their expected behavior when flying with us,” Delta representatives told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

. . . Separately, American Airlines AAL, -0.20% and United Airlines UAL, +1.20% have both indicated that they are willing to lift the bans they imposed now that masks are optional on flights.

So here's the rub. In reiterating the continuing need for masks in arbitrary circumstances, the CDC said it "remains necessary for the public health". But nobody's listening, and more important, as far as we can tell, nobody's getting sicker, which is simply proving that the mandate is arbitrary and unnecessary.

And as of now, the extension of the extension of the mandate is still scheduled to expire May 3, a little over a week away. If nobody but the LA County health director and some (but not all) transit agencies is observing it now, will that change if the CDC extends it again? The only justification for either extending the mandate or appealing the judge's decision is to preserve the CDC's ability to mandate masks in the future, but at this stage, the CDC and Drs Walensky and Fauci are simply confirming their status as national jokes. If there were a new COVID-22 epidemic tomorrow, the CDC already would have much diminished credibility to reinstate any sort of measures like thoae they've exhausted with COVID-19 no matter what.

Isn't this counterproductive?