With Omicron here in the United States, you bet this was going to happen. It allows the government to either extend or reimpose the very COVID protocols that didn’t work in the first place. Masks are the primary focal point here. Do masks work curbing COVID? On paper, yes—but only those wearing custom-fitted masks or N95s. The vast majority of us wore the China-made store-bought masks which do next to nothing. Dr. Anthony Fauci even admitted to that in his revealed emails earlier this year. It’s why California, which has a near-universal mask compliance rate had around one million new cases in six weeks around the Thanksgiving holiday last year. It’s become more of a participation trophy. It does nothing, but it looks good, and it keeps people in line, so the government keeps it around. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg gave the game away on this when he refused to nix the mask mandate for air travel because it was out of respect. So, we’ve tossed the science out the window here?
For public transportation, the mask mandate was set to expire next month. Now, Biden is reportedly going to keep the mask mandate in place until mid-March (via NBC News):
The Biden administration on Thursday is expected to announce that a federal mask mandate for public transportation will be extended into mid-March, two sources told NBC News on Wednesday.
The mask requirement for buses, trains and planes is currently set to expire on Jan. 18. The requirement also applies to airports and train stations.
The extension, which was first reported by Reuters, comes as the country has been preparing to combat the omicron variant of the coronavirus. A formal announcement is expected at some point Thursday, the sources said, when President Joe Biden is expected to lay out his administration's plan for combating Covid-19 this winter.
Mask requirements on airplanes in particular have contributed to violent outbursts by some passengers who have refused to abide by the rules. As of last month, the Federal Aviation Administration said there were 5,114 reports of unruly passengers and 3,710 reports of passengers refusing to wear a face mask since the beginning of the year.
Ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed government prosecutors to make federal crimes on commercial airliners a priority after the surge in attacks.
Omicron is notable for a few things. One, we don’t know if it’s more contagious or not. It very well might be, but there’s no need to panic. Those who’ve had it have mild symptoms. It’s not more lethal. Everyone needs to take a chill pill. What we do know is that this is really the Xi variant, but the experts skipped that part of the Greek alphabet because it might offend the Chinese. Again, that’s all you need to know. The medical experts were more worried about a politically correct name for the variant than the new strain itself.