Hours after a federal judge struck down the federal mask mandate covering air travel and other public transportation last month, Delta Airlines celebrated the move in a statement saying that Covid-19 “has transitioned to an ordinary seasonal virus.” By the next day, after an intense backlash from public health experts, Delta had taken the offending language down.
“‘Ordinary viruses don’t cause 1 million deaths in one country in just 2 years,” tweeted epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, a senior adviser at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute.