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PANDEMIC TRAVEL
What’s Air Travel Like in the Omicron Era?
Chin Masks! Coughing! Confrontation!
I was in the terminal, waiting to board my night flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia and everyone around me was wearing their masks properly. Except for one guy. A blond dude in his late 30s, he wore a mask that covered his chin but not his mouth or nose.
“With my luck,” I thought to myself, “when I get on the plane, he’ll be sitting next to me.”
He wasn’t. He was sitting directly behind me. Still wearing his mask around his chin. His wife, in the window seat with a baby in her arms, wore her mask properly. But their young daughter didn’t wear a mask at all. And she had a really bad cough. She coughed and coughed and coughed without stopping. And without covering her mouth.
Not only that but she kept standing behind my seat and poking her little face through the space between my seat and the seat beside mine, and coughing.
There was nothing I could do about her, but I quietly asked the flight attendant to ask the dude in seat 12D to cover his nose. A moment later, I was relieved to overhear her doing just that.
As the plane pulled away from the terminal and headed toward the runway, Mr. Chin Mask got into a fight with the guy…
