With Joy and Fear, Americans Watch Sweeping Mask Rules Vanish

[Celerity]

“Up to them,” President Biden told reporters in New Hampshire on Tuesday when he was asked whether people should continue to wear masks.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/us/covid-masks-planes.html

https://archive.ph/6uokR



It began in midair. Shortly after a federal judge struck down mask requirements on planes, pilots got on intercoms to share the news, and some passengers tore off their masks with whoops and glee.

Jonathan Russell Biehl, a pilot for Delta, was halfway from Tampa to Minneapolis on Monday night when the announcement came. “The day I’ve been waiting for,” he called it. But on another flight bound for Los Angeles, Brooke Tansley, who was flying with two children too young to be vaccinated, said she felt scared as the passengers around her slipped off their masks. “All I could do was hope it’s going to be OK,” she said.

By Tuesday, more than a year after the country imposed strict masking requirements on airplanes and public transportation to combat the spread of the coronavirus, a judge’s determination that the federal government had overstepped its boundaries rippled across the country. The unexpected ruling by one judge in Florida instantly reshaped travel for millions while sharpening political divisions over the virus and sowing new confusion over where, exactly, Americans now need to mask up.

As much as ever, the country’s pandemic rules are a confounding patchwork. Mask requirements were toppled for many subways, buses and ride-share services. But the rules remained in place in several major cities. Subway riders in New York City were still required to wear facial coverings, but New Jersey Transit riders just across the Hudson River were allowed to take theirs off. In Philadelphia, where officials had reinstituted an indoor mask requirement this week, people were allowed to go maskless on trains and buses.

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