Airlines want to drop COVID-19 travel precautions. Is now the right time?

After one of the most turbulent periods in the history of air travel, laden with new rules and regulations and a lot of rebellious and disruptive passengers, the airlines want to leave. it was COVID flight safety measures.

CEOs of the country’s major airlines sent a letter to the White House this week asking the Biden administration to terminate vaccination requirements and pre-departure tests for international travelers and abandoning the federal mask mandate on flights, arguing that measures are no longer necessary as coronavirus infections fall sharply in the US

The precautions “are no longer aligned with the realities of the current epidemiological environment,” they say in the letter.

Epidemiologists are not so sure, saying it might be too early to remove COVID-19 rules in the air. Allowing passengers to fly unmasked could also deter older, immunocompromised customers from traveling, while hurting the airline’s business.

When can we relax?

“It’s reasonable to have a conversation about when we should relax these restrictions,” David Dowdy, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told CBS MoneyWatch. “When the [Biden] The administration should respond by lifting these restrictions is a different matter. It may be about a month too early to make those decisions. “

Before COVID-19 protocols can be lifted on aircraft, a threshold must be set to abandon precautions and another to re-establish mandates if virus cases begin to rise again.

“We have to determine ‘when we relax the precautions’ and ‘when we restore them’ if we see the cases escalate again. Otherwise, you could argue that we will keep them in place until COVID is left on the ground,” Dowdy said. . .

“I would like the cases to go down again and the last of the hot spots to die a little longer,” he added.

Airline executives argue that it is time to lift mask warrants because they are no longer needed in many other public settings, such as restaurants and retail stores, where the risk of transmission is higher.

“It doesn’t make sense that people are still required to wear masks on planes, but they are allowed to congregate in restaurants, schools and sporting events full of people without masks, although none of these places have the protective system. of air filtration that airplanes do “. CEOs of nearly a dozen airlines, including American, Delta, JetBlue and United, wrote in their letter.

Potential “case explosion”

Air quality in aircraft is generally good because aircraft are equipped with hospital-grade HEPA filters that constantly recirculate fresh air in the cabin. But the risk of transmission would increase substantially if most passengers, especially infectious people, stopped wearing masks.

Mercedes Carnethon, vice president of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said that for most healthy Americans who are vaccinated against COVID-19, the removal of masks in you want to take a serious risk. But the calculation changes if you are sitting near a person infected with the disease.

“Air quality is good on a plane. However, when you are sitting next to someone who has a COVID infection, someone in your 10th row may not contract it, but it will not protect the person. sitting next to you, “Carnethon told CBS MoneyWatch.

“If you push back all mitigation strategies at once, you have great potential to see a case explosion, and that’s risky,” he added.

When it comes to restoring confidence in air travel, Carnethon also said ending mask mandates could end up having the opposite effect to what the airlines claim.

“The reasons why they are pushing to leave are economic reasons that they perceive will help drive travel, but will end up excluding a demographic group for which it is not safe to be in an enclosed space without masks, including older adults and adults who are immune compromised, “he said. “From a business standpoint, I don’t know if it will give the economic gains they think it will have if people at risk make the decision not to travel.”

A burden for airline staff

In their efforts to eliminate the rules of the virus in flight, the CEOs of the airlines also highlight the toll that the application of pandemic health measures has had on airline staff. This includes ticketing agents in charge of verifying the results of COVID-19 tests, and flight attendants effectively assigned the role of mask applicators, leading to altercations with rebel passengers who refused to disguise themselves. -se.

“This is not a function for which they are trained and subject them to the daily challenges of frustrated customers. This, in turn, affects their own well-being,” CEOs said.

In fact, uncomfortable passengers who have refused to comply with mask mandates have been a challenge for flight attendants.

“It was already a tough enough job to be a flight attendant, but then having to be a gorilla on top and do it 30,000 feet in the air, frankly, is asking too much,” flight expert Scott Keyes said. and founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights, a website that finds airfare deals for its members, he told CBS MoneyWatch. “There have been so many disruptions and incidents of air rage, and I think a lot of that can be traced back to these rules: people who crawl for having to wear masks and other people who don’t wear them properly. I think once they don’t. That’s the decent thing to do, and it should end there. “

A better solution?

Keyes thinks that removing the requirement for international travelers to show a negative COVID-19 test result would have a more significant effect on passenger travel decisions, as the tests can be uncomfortable and a positive test result. it could mean having to quarantine abroad.

“You can’t take a test at home. You have to spend a significant part of the last day of your trip getting a negative test. And the sky doesn’t give you an infection and you’re stuck for a while; people for international travel, “he said.

This is also partly why he believes that international travel has not yet fully recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

“The testing requirement is preventing a lot of people from making trips that they would otherwise have made,” Keyes said.

Carri Chan, a professor of decision-making, risk and operations at Columbia Business School, agreed that the test requirement has been a more important barrier to travel than the mask mandate.

“Certainly, for international flights returning to the U.S., there are people who are concerned about the financial ramifications of not being able to return if they test positive,” MoneyWatch told CBS. He also said that giving up COVID-19 precautions could decrease the travel demand of families with young children, who are not yet eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine.

“This could affect demand in another way,” he said. “I think removing the warrant from the mask is likely to be more of a deterrent, while getting rid of the testing requirement may increase demand.”