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“ “I very much want to travel but I’m not going to fly until I know that everybody has a mask on because that is how you protect yourself. To have mask optional is like saying, ‘Hey, Covid optional.’” ”
That’s CNBC’s Jim Cramer explaining Monday why he believes a national mask mandate is critical to not only help curb the spread of the coronavirus but also to get people flying again.
He said that corporate travel, in particular, won’t return in a meaningful way until Washington makes wearing masks a requirement. Currently, the CDC recommends cloth face coverings in “public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain.”
Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, is on the same page. He recently said that wearing masks is something we can do “to try reduce the spread. It’s really all we have and it’s not a very robust tool at that. But it’s a tool that we have [and] a tool has been demonstrated to have an impact if everyone does it, or most people do it.”
Cramer, for his part, said that not wearing a mask is “just too dangerous” and that businesses will instead stick with Zoom ZM, +3.19% and Webex to achieve the same results.
Here are Cramer’s comments:
Airline are slowly coming back, but there’s a long way to go. According to TSA data cited by CNBC, 590,456 people went through security checkpoints on Sunday, the highest since March 20 but still well below the 2.7 million that passed through gates a year ago.
Masks continues to be a politically divisive topic. Last week, an American Airlines AAL, -6.75% passenger was removed from a flight for refusing to wear one.
And, of course, thousands of supporters who gathered Saturday at Trump’s rally in Tulsa did not wear masks and were not required to do so, despite CDC recommendations.
