Thread by @benskuhn

Today @Delta both:
(a) made me remove the p100 I was wearing underneath my valve-less cloth mask;
(b) let people around me wear masks under chins for hours 🤦‍♂️

So I was surrounded by maskless people + had a much less safe mask myself. 0/10 idiotic safety theater, fly elsewhere.

(Why try a p100? Based on a microcovid.org rec—it's easier to get a good seal with a P100 respirator than an N95, and they are better filters. The cloth mask protected others from outflow. But, silly me to do something that needed *thinking* to verify it was ok.)

Classic case of rules based on socially-approved talismans rather than effects on reality:
1. As I pointed out at the time, (their interpretation of) the policy was instructing me to *just remove* a layer of protection and this couldn't possibly make anyone safer.

(This seemed to trigger a glitch in the conversational logic of the person I was talking with; he stopped trying to respond to anything I was saying and just started repeating variants of "you need to get a different mask" and "if it has a valve, it's not allowed" over and over.)

(Attempted steelman of this behavior: perhaps most people who wear a funny-looking mask are indeed wearing an unsafe mask, but are still able to out-argue the flight attendant, so the "glitch" is actually the safety-optimizing response on average?)

2. There was clearly selective enforcement based on the fact that me wearing P100 + normal mask looked weird, whereas all the people with masks under their chins were behaving socially normally (even though much more dangerously).

FWIW, United at least states that they allow this, so maybe a better option for non-socially-normal mask behavior? (Of course who knows whether flight crews will actually apply the rule correctly.)

https://twitter.com/united/status/1332785939761016833