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Health experts expect rise in COVID cases as airline, public transit mask mandates reverse

Despite a possible appeal on the way, the federal public mask mandate is currently over — but experts warn COVID may not be.

MINNEAPOLIS — Public transit and airplanes were some of the earliest places to introduce pandemic precautions. Now two years in, mask mandates are done — at least for now. 

The Department of Justice announced Tuesday it will appeal a federal district judge's ruling that ended the federal mask mandate on public transit if the CDC decides the requirement is still necessary. 

Until then, the mandate remains lifted and health experts say that will likely mean more COVID cases. Dr. Kumi Smith is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota's Division of Epidemiology and Community Health within the School of Public Health.

"It's not clear that COVID's quite done with us," Smith said. "Public transit is a new frontier that we haven't tried relaxing rules on yet and we're potentially a little premature in this … because these are places where masking mandates have a pretty substantial public health impact. It's a place where there's lots of people. Lots of people, commingling from different areas, often doing so in enclosed spaces."

She says, unlike children in schools, public transit riders and airplane passengers usually don't need to be as interactive or show facial expressions.

"That's why I think there's a number of public health folks who are probably less supportive of this," Smith said. "I do think that mask mandates, especially in public transit, is a matter of health equity. We know from early on in the pandemic that many of the same folks who were forced to work in person — and this is before vaccines — were also those who are probably likely to be still taking public transit. That experience taught us that exposure to COVID risk is not distributed evenly across society. So masks have been a really powerful, cheap, feasible way to mitigate that disproportionate impact of COVID on those that don't have the luxury of working from home, or commuting in personal cars or doing Zoom interviews. So I think from that perspective, we do anticipate some potential real sort of social impact of lifting mandates like this."

Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an associate professor at the U's Division of Health Policy and Management, says with fewer masks, "It's inevitable that we'll see more cases" of the highly contagious omicron BA.2 variant. But will the majority of cases be severe? 

"The CDC has backed off on counting cases and is now counting the most serious outcomes of cases, mainly hospitalizations, but we also know that hospitalizations lag behind increase in cases by a couple of weeks," Wurtz said. "And with more people than ever testing at home, if they're going to test, those numbers don't make it into case counts. So there are lots of reasons to be concerned that this could creep up on us without us being aware of it and then trying to put the genie back in the bottle is always hard."

Although the mandates are lifted for now, many health experts recommend still masking on planes, buses and trains. Out in the public, not everyone agrees.

"I believe that we're kind of past this, you know? We're getting to more better times and I think that we're going to be moving in the right direction doing this," said one maskless passenger traveling through MSP International Airport Tuesday. "It's a big move. It's a huge move."

"For me, I don't even understand why people are worried about wearing a mask,"  said a Metro Transit rider wearing two masks while waiting for the Light Rail downtown. "It protects them, it protects the family and the whole community, so why not?"

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