CDC’s silly stalling on flight masks

The Transportation Security Administration, following the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will extend its mask mandate for airplanes through mid-April. Once again, the CDC is behind the curve.

The TSA announcement comes as virtually all states and major cities have dropped their indoor mask mandates in response to plunging numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It also comes a week after the CDC eased its mask guidance for communities which overnight reduced recommendations for indoor masking from roughly 95 percent to about 37 percent of US counties. The numbers have only improved since — CDC’s latest update shows that 98 percent of Americans who live in 94 percent of US counties need not mask.

CDC’s guidelines moved from measuring community transmission to measuring community levels of disease — how much strain the virus is placing on a community’s health-care system as indicated by new COVID hospitalizations, the share of hospital beds occupied by patients admitted for COVID and new COVID cases. The new guidelines recognized that with the predominant, highly contagious but generally mild, Omicron variant, measuring transmission became much less important.