This is a quick take on something I see almost no one doing but think basically everyone should: wearing an N95 mask whenever you’re in an airport, at least for the outbound flight.
I don’t enjoy masking
Throughout COVID, I was always very careful to mask, and spent time telling friends and colleagues to buy high-quality N95 masks. I was a teacher, and when school got back in I was careful to mask until I and the students had all had a chance to get vaccinated. It was pretty obvious that the trade-offs made masking worth it before we had an effective vaccine.
Masks also made me somewhat depressed. A lot of normal interactions with students and other teachers felt much more stilted and unnatural because we couldn’t see each other’s full face. I was more than happy to take this hit to keep everyone safe, but my classroom felt more lifeless than normal. It was especially dispiriting because students had also lost a lot of normal time together to school shutdowns over the last year. Normal life still felt very far away. I also personally find masks somewhat uncomfortable, especially when I was lecturing in one for hours a day.
Getting the vaccine was pretty transcendent. Since then, I don’t mask in public unless I’m sick, because I see the vaccine as equivalent to wearing an N95 all the time anyway. I do always mask if I’m sick. I also think everyone should invest in a new high-quality reusable mask (maybe this one, as a heads-up friends debate how comfy it is. Find one that works for you!) to have around in case there’s another pandemic (which AI might make more likely). If we all had and wore high-quality masks all the time in March 2020, many many fewer people would have died and life could’ve been a little more normal than it was.
I say all this to get across:
If you hate masking, I really really get it.
I think masks were very important during the pandemic.
I mostly don’t think masking is useful now unless you’re sick. The most important thing is obviously keeping up with COVID booster shots.
You should really buy a new high-quality mask in case of another pandemic. Seriously, do it!
But I’ve recently decided to start masking every single time I’m in an airport specifically. The argument here is pretty straightforward.
Why you should always mask at airports
Three simple facts about airports together make it seem like it makes a lot of sense to mask there:
Airports seem like the single most likely place you’ll get sick per unit of time spent there. You come into close contact with a lot of strangers from all over the country and world in an airport, way more than anywhere else in your life. Whether an illness is “going around” your specific area tells you little about what’s in an airport. Even if the airport is made up entirely of people from your area, you’re still coming into close contact with way more strangers than normal.
If you’re in an airport, it’s likely that you’ve just spent a lot of money to get somewhere important to you, where getting sick for just a few days takes away most of the value. If you get sick in the airport, a lot of that money (potentially thousands of dollars) will be wasted. You have very few opportunities to travel for fun in life, so the opportunity cost alone is often huge. For every additional person you’re traveling with, the opportunity cost saved by masking roughly doubles.
You only spend 2-3 hours there. To follow this rule, you just have to be in discomfort in a mask for a few hours each year. Your experience in the airport isn’t super important to the quality of your trip, so it’s the best time to be a little uncomfortable. Masking is uncomfortable and I don’t like it, but this is a place where it seems more than worth it.
So almost every time you’re in an airport, you’re taking on a much higher risk of getting sick right at the moment where getting sick has a drastically higher opportunity cost than normal. You can cancel this out with the mild discomfort of a mask for at most 3 hours during the most boring unimportant part of your trip. You can take off the mask a few minutes after the plane itself takes off, because planes actually have some of the safest, well-ventilated air anywhere.
This argument seems pretty simple and straightforward, but whenever I’m in an airport I see almost no one masking. It’s fine if they want to take the risk, but I think we’re all actually risking a lot of value for some mild comfort during the most boring and unimportant part of the trip. Consider masking whenever you fly (at least on the outbound flight), and also buy a mask for future pandemics.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that airplane ventilation is only good *during flight* (or while engines are running). So boarding, deplaning, and while parked at the gate may be some of the most high-impact times to mask.
This is an interesting take but before I would act on it, I'd want to do a better (or, really, any) estimation of the benefits.
Your intuition that airports are places where you're extra-likely to get sick may be true, but given that they're also relatively large and well-ventilated spaces where you don't spend a lot of time in close contact with others, I'm not sure that intuition is right. If you go out to dinner on your trip, the exposure risks may be as high or higher, and you *can't* mask there. And even if you get sick, is the disease you might pick up via a respiratory pathway *in the airport* (as opposed to fomites, which seem to be an easy way to get rhinoviruses, or something food-borne) likely to be of a severity and incubation period that it'll really ruin your trip?
At least subjectively, speaking as a frequent business traveler before and since the pandemic, I rarely get respiratory illnesses, and when I do they're usually mild (rather than something that would meaningfully impact a vacation if I pop a Sudafed). Even if you somehow assumed that the risk of illness on a trip goes to 0 if I mask up in an airport, it appears to be a pretty low baseline.
Weighed against that, of course, is what's at stake. I'm affluent enough that risking an ordinary vacation is not tantamount to risking missing a child's wedding or some other once-in-a-lifetime event.
On the other hand, I'd gladly take three hours of a cold—including on holiday—over three hours in a mask. Subjectively, I find wearing a mask to be roughly as bad, hour-for-hour, as any respiratory virus I've had. (I know I've been lucky, or my flu shots have worked.)
Bottom line, while masking can make sense as a way to try to stave off serious illness until you can get vaccinated in a pandemic, I don't think it's worthwhile in everyday settings outside one—including airports.