The film Please Remove Your Shoes, released in 2010, documents the development of security theater in airports after 9/11. It shows how the Transportation Security Administration’s screening for commercial flights encouraged a false sense of security among passengers so that they are more likely to fly — without making anyone much safer. This conclusion is reinforced each time screeners fail another test by inspectors who sneak guns and other weapons past them.
The headline absurdity of the film is the annoyance passengers must endure for the charade of security. The requirement that passengers take off their shoes continues to baffle most people, but don’t forget the business about being forced to take all the electronic devices out of your bags and putting each of them in a separate bin — not the bin your shoes are in, because that might cause the plane to explode.
Security theater is not just about boarding airlines. It’s also about making people feel secure from COVID-19 when such security does not exist.
We live in a new era in which there are simply more disease risks than before. COVID-19 increased the average American’s chances of dying in a given year from about 0.72% in 2019 to 0.82% in 2020. That’s not negligible, but here’s some additional perspective: Before the pandemic, the death rate in several states was already higher than 0.82%. If you think you might have been willing to chance living in Tennessee in 2019, you were probably already contemplating a greater statistical risk of death than you face now amid the pandemic (depending, of course, on where you actually do live).
This is not the Black Death, slaying nations. Rather, it’s just another manageable risk to your health and life, like so many others. It’s been two years since the first known case, and people are over it. Everyone will have to learn to live with a bit more risk. Many people have adjusted well, but many haven’t.
Unfortunately, the administration won’t let go of the foolish, impossible goal of zero COVID. Biden’s proposal to extend mask-wearing on airplanes through March will do little to prevent the spread of a disease that everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated, is probably doomed to get. Throw in his Africa travel ban and his new mandatory quarantine proposal for all new international arrivals, and Biden’s plan to defeat the coronavirus is just a more dramatic and inconvenient version of security theater.
People in places such as New York and Washington, D.C., may not be aware of it, but most of the country moved on from mask-wearing months ago. Those who got vaccinated largely stopped wearing masks last spring. Those unwisely refusing vaccination were probably not masking in the first place, and at this point, they certainly aren’t. If you don’t believe us, just watch Monday Night Football and look at the packed stands. See all those faces? That’s how most people live every day: mask-free, aware of the increased risk, not losing sleep over it.
Air travel is the great exception, but only because it is one of the few areas of daily life that the federal government controls. A study by Yale and Stanford scientists on mask-wearing found that cloth masks (very few people wear proper surgical masks) are roughly 37% effective at filtering out droplets that can carry the coronavirus. Considering that almost no one is wearing a mask anywhere except in flight and at the airport anyway, this marginally effective safety measure will do little to arrest the spread of the virus through air travel.
Fortunately, the coronavirus’s effect on human health seems to get weaker as its variants become more virulent. Also fortunately, drug companies have come up with new and cheaper therapies to treat COVID-19 since prevention is not, and never was, a realistic long-term goal.
In the meantime, there is no reason for Biden to play the fool of the security theater. He is understandably coming under pressure to do something, anything, as approval of his handling of the pandemic plunges. Political pressure is a strong but often unhelpful incentive.
