Power Line's John Hinderaker writes about his impatience with vaccinated people still wearing masks, I know a lot of folks agree with him. Mostly I do too.
The one place where I might wear a mask going forward is on an airliner. Those seats are close together, left to right and back to front. What's circulating in the pressurized cabin at 30,000 feet isn't exactly fresh air. And shared restrooms aren't sanitized after every use, more like after every flight.
The other DrC and I have been to something like 120 countries, so we've done a lot of flying including the interminable trans-Pacific flights to and from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore. In the best of times, it has been our experience that flying carries an increased risk of catching a communicable illness, normally respiratory or gastrointestinal.
There have been times, coming home from a cruise that ended in Sydney or Rome where we got sick on the ship and were literally a disease vector flying home, putting other passengers at risk. And if we've done it, I know others do too. If you don't feel great you want to get home.
I have a funny story about that. Coming back from Australia with a painful cough, I needed DM cough medicine in quantity. I feared security wouldn't let me bring the big bottle on board. So I grabbed the little bottles in the stateroom minibar, poured out the booze, filled them with cough syrup, and because they were small, got enough on board to get me home without coughing my head off. Feel free to borrow the idea if you find yourself in that predicament.
Bottom line: I will wear a mask whenever I fly, and I might fly with a pocketful of surgical gloves too. I think of commercial passenger planes as airborne petri dishes.
