Originally Posted by
pinniped
Those tiny in-state airlines probably don't connect passengers to/from the rest of the world at the scale that AS does. As long as covid is a significant risk in much of their route network, people should wear masks throughout the *entire* route network.
I'm sort of assuming that the caseloads in rural Alaska are low.
That assumption would be wrong from a casual glance at, say, the NY Times county-by-county (or census area by census area)
case map. Some of the rural areas in Alaska have north of 100 daily cases per 100,000 people, consistent with the pattern pretty much everywhere else: this is no longer confined to dense urban areas.
You could argue that all passengers on any airline should mask up on every flight - no matter how small - and won't get any argument from me. It's a tiny inconvenience that can reduce the spread of the disease by a modest amount. It's an easy, free, zero-side-effect thing we can do right now. It continues to boggle my mind how this, of all things, became political.
For sure they should. Or, more precisely, all people in any place in close proximity to people outside their household should wear a mask. Airplanes don't appear to be especially good places for transmission, but there's no reason to believe they're especially safe for droplet transmission either.