AEven if the pictures, which were sent by the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellor from the government plane over Canada and Newfoundland, do not suggest it, masks are compulsory on air travel. Even more: the obligation to wear FFP2 masks (among other things) on airplanes is fixed, including on government flights. And the subsequent hint from Olaf Scholz that it shouldn’t look like it did, that there are only “clear rules” and no Corona extra sausages or privileges, this at least shows one thing: a certain residual understanding for the annoyance that such slovenliness can still cause when politicians deal with the corona measures (Boris Johnson’s corona freaks have not been forgotten).
In any case, speculating about whether the two of them actually saved themselves from wearing masks out of vanity, tiredness or out of habit – and thus against the government line that was alerted to the pandemic – hardly leads any further. Because what counts are the rules, and they are now on the table with the update of the Infection Protection Act for the fall. Wearing masks is firmly established as a priority measure, provided Parliament agrees. That is not at all a matter of course. Anyone who remembers the early days of the pandemic, or who goes even further back, can only be amazed at how the mask was repeatedly misused both as a political symbol and as a medical protective tool. Even before Covid-19, the most influential institutions and most powerful personalities flatly denied that pathogenic germs can spread in large numbers through tiny, invisible aerosols in the air.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US disease control agency CDC, for example, only accepted the extremely easy and persistent airborne transmission of the Sars-CoV-2 virus on their website in April and May 2021, i.e. a year and a half after the start of the pandemic. In spring 2020, weeks after the first clear evidence of airborne transmission, the WHO still insisted that the virus could only be acquired in droplets through sneezing, coughing or contact infection. At the time, she described the evidence of infection through floating and concentrating virus particles in the air as “disinformation”. In fact, she made a historical mistake that an ininternational research team led by historian Jose Jiminez traced back to the time of Hippocrates.
Thus, sometime in the early twentieth century, its general notion of “bad air” or miasma—a type of disease-causing vapor—was so deconstructed that diffuse airborne disease transmission was simply unacceptable. Some of the authorities took so much inner conviction against all scientific evidence (measles was factually misclassified for 70 years) that they ended up doing everything they could to save face, hoping the infection would soon be over and forgotten will. A false hope, that much is clear today.
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