If You Want People to Follow Covid Rules, They Need to Make Sense

I don’t know what is going to happen with Covid.  I don’t think anybody, at least anybody who is being honest, does.  Among the problems (out of many) of the last two years has been the false certainty of so many people.  There has not been enough humility and honest uncertainty.

In that regard, let me just complain about one rule that, while it made sense when it was adopted, doesn’t make sense any more but stays in place because nobody seems to think about it.

Last December, when Omicron was taking off, the Biden administration tightened the rule for a negative Covid test to fly back to the U.S.: You had to get a negative test the day before your flight.  Which made sense then.  But does it now?

We recently came back from three-week vacation, and we had to get one of those negative Covid tests.  And we had to get them even though, the day we left on our vacation, a federal court voided even the mask requirement for flights inside the United States.  While the Administration appealed the ruling, it didn’t seem to care much. 

So you had a situation where, to fly to the United States, you had to show a negative Covid test, but to fly in the United States you didn’t even have to wear a mask.  Also, you didn’t have to have a negative Covid test to cross into the United States by land.  You could drive from Toronto to Buffalo without a Covid test but you couldn’t fly from Toronto to Buffalo without a test.  You needed a Covid test to fly from Lisbon to Newark (a six-hour flight), but you didn’t even need a mask to fly from Newark to LAX (maybe a five and one-half hour-flight).

When we were in Istanbul, I was wondering what we would do if one of us had a positive test, even a false positive.¹  So I came up with an idea: We could fly from Istanbul to Toronto (Canada doesn’t have the Covid test requirement), take a bus to Buffalo, and then fly home from Buffalo.  That probably seemed excessive, but when I got home, I found out, from the person who cuts my hair, that his niece and her husband had done that exact thing (though from Copenhagen) when he tested positive and yet felt fine.²

It's the illogic of the situation that is aggravating.  People in government need to pay more attention to the rules they adopt and how they need to change over time.  You can’t just adopt rules and forget about them.  They need to fit together and they need to fit the situation.  If the facts change, the rules need to change.  And there needs to be a logic to them.  If you want people to follow the rules, the rules have to make sense.  And they have to be explained in a way that can convince people.  Which gets back to the humility and honest uncertainty I talked about in the first paragraph.  Which we are not seeing enough of.
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¹ And what if, after one of you gets a negative test, the other then tested positive?  The government just said you needed to have a plan before you left.  That’s real helpful.
² Some will say that, if you tested positive, you shouldn’t be flying.  Well, if that is true, why shouldn’t we require tests for flights inside the U.S., too?  Newark to LAX is a heck of a lot longer than Toronto to Chicago, but you need a test for the latter and not the former.