Southwest Airlines Community

This is not true The administration, at the time of announcement and continuing today, recommends masks.  Medical authorities recommend masks. Why are adults acting like children and insisting on not following recommended medical practices?  What about your fellow human beings that are elderly and immunocompromised?  What kind of society are we becoming when we don't care that our actions can injure and harm others? ... View more

https://fortune.com/2022/04/19/us-flight-mask-mandate-suspended-risk-covid-omicron/   Airplane filtration ... a plane’s effective filtration system leaves the danger of catching COVID from air that has not yet been filtered. For a passenger, that might come from contact with airborne droplets from someone close by, such as a neighboring passenger or someone traveling to and from different parts of the plane. Planes also turn off their filtration systems during boarding and deplaning, as well as during refueling stops in transit. These periods are the points when most passengers are likely moving around the plane as they handle their luggage, which may increase the risk of transmission. In addition, filtration systems may not be as good—if they exist at all—during other parts of the air travel process, such as when passengers line up on the jet bridge that connects the airport gate to the plane   But a plane’s effective filtration system leaves the danger of catching COVID from air that has not yet been filtered. For a passenger, that might come from contact with airborne droplets from someone close by, such as a neighboring passenger or someone traveling to and from different parts of the plane. Planes also turn off their filtration systems during boarding and deplaning, as well as during refueling stops in transit. These periods are the points when most passengers are likely moving around the plane as they handle their luggage, which may increase the risk of transmission. In addition, filtration systems may not be as good—if they exist at all—during other parts of the air travel process, such as when passengers line up on the jet bridge that connects the airport gate to the plane. Do masks help prevent COVID spreading on a plane? A mask serves two purposes: It prevents a COVID carrier from transmitting the virus to other people, and protects the wearer against catching COVID from someone else. Masks differ in terms of their level of protection, especially regarding more transmissible COVID variants like Omicron, with N95 masks providing the most and cloth masks providing the least protection. Because of the difficulty of determining how and when someone on a flight may have caught COVID, we don’t have a clear picture of how easy it is to catch COVID on a plane. Yet some early studies suggest that masking on flights did help to prevent transmission, at least early in the pandemic.    A September 2020 study found no cases of in-flight transmission on long-haul flights by Emirates—an airline with a strict masking policy—between Dubai and Hong Kong, despite there being positive cases on the flight among those who boarded. Another study, from March 2021, estimated that allowing a one-hour meal service during a 12-hour flight—when you might assume most passengers would take off their masks to eat—increased the chance of infection by 59% compared with a scenario when masks were kept on during the whole flight. However, these studies were conducted before the more transmissible Omicron variant emerged. In December, the chief medical adviser to the IATA estimated that passengers were two to three times as likely to catch Omicron on a plane as compared with earlier COVID variants.   ... View more

Depends where you live.  The state where I live dropped the mask mandate a month or two ago.  Everyone is still wearing masks in stores, etc.  Lots even wear masks outside.  This is a educated population. ... View more

Disappointed in Southwest for jumping on the bandwagon. For the first time in two years, I planned to fly on Southwest next week.  That will be cancelled.   Only 36% of Americans think it's time for people to stop using masks and quarantines so that life can get back to normal after COVID-19, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between Jan. 31 and Feb. 7. ... View more