This article in the August 7, 2021 Mercury News will be of interest to anyone charged with enforcing the current FRA and TSA mask rules:Link to full article:
Borenstein: 19% of California COVID cases are breakthroughs — and why it matters This is not an indication of vaccine failure; it is a key reason why vaccinated people should wear masks in public

I dislike the way they lump everything together and count it as a case. Everything from an unvaccinated person in the hospital on a ventilator down to a vaccinated person with no symptoms who tests positive are given the same weight in the case count. That paints an inaccurate picture of the situation at hand. Yes cases are on the rise but if a lot of them are people with no symptoms to something akin to the flu, then what are we worried about? The vaccine is doing its job.

The Mercury News link is to an opinion column.
Opinion.

In before this post gets locked

I live in a county that is blessed to have 11 hospitals with emergency rooms.

7 of the 11 hospitals are currently in "Severe" (Red) overcrowding status and on diversion, meaning that they are not accepting ambulances. 2 of the 11 hospitals are "Overcrowded" (Yellow) and also on diversion. The remaining 2 hospitals are showing Normal (Green) status, but they are Children's hospitals.

The county next door has 6 hospitals with ERs. 4 of the 6 are in "Severe" (Red) overcrowding status and on diversion; this includes the Regional VA hospital. The remaining 2 hospitals are showing Normal (Green) status, but one is a Children's hospital and the other is an Orthopaedics and Spine Hospital.

Just wear the mask. There's no reason not to but selfishness. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I'll help it along, I guess, but you appear to be an infantile reductive troll who nobody should be taking seriously.

Or I actually read and don't listen to talking heads for medical information. The covid bug is .06 to 1.4 microns in size. If you aren't wearing an N95 mask, that patch of handkerchief loosely bound around your mouth is only for a psychological benefit.

I'm not going to get more in-depth about filtration media, or how it's sometimes easier to trap smaller particles than covid, you can look that up for yourself if you dare.

I'm really wanting to stay out of discussing this further but I feel people deserve to know the facts. The latest CDC guidelines, as of last week, were that vaccinated people should wear masks to protect the UNvaccinated. Why is that? Vaxxed people who are contracting covid variants (or who received one of the mRna vaccines and whose bodies are now replicating covid) are shedding covid at an increased rate over non-vaxxed persons.

I'm not a medical person by profession (although I am in a science-based field), but I can certainly read a research paper and make my own educated conclusions. I invite everyone else to do the same.

And please seek immediate medical assistance if you have any cardiac symptoms - research is showing a mutation in the shape of red blood cells in vaxxed persons, changing them from round to cylindrical, which can form blockages. This is contrasted by the micro clotting observed in persons with covid, especially people with stents. So no matter what your status, if you have symptoms, seek help.

You're picking info based on what you wish were the case.

Masks are not about stopping the virus cells. They're about stopping the water that it's inhabiting.

So maybe you should listen to people who actually know things about this stuff instead of "doing your own research" and assuming your opinion is more informed than experts.

Adorama, a NYC camera store, is currently selling 20 KN-95 masks for $15.95 with free shipping. That works out to 80 cents per mask, before taxes.

ProjectN95 has a variety of real N95 Respirators, the cheapest being sold in packs of 50 for $54. Their shipping costs can be expensive, but the last batch I ordered cost about $1.30 per respirator after shipping and taxes.

I wish a simple cloth mask made a difference. The (real) published reports do not indicate that they do. I also wish that children never got cancer and that it was still 1952, but wishing doesn't make it so. Science is fluid, ask anyone who was an earth scientist before the theory of plate tectonics.

I have had people that I knew personally die from covid and also from the vaccine. I have no bone to pick or agenda to drive. I am simply looking for truth. Doctors and scientists are not gods, they are people like you and me with a paper on the wall to show they can read, comprehend and regurgitate specific information.

By the way, please post your medical credentials.

Ed's referring to droplet spread theory that a lot of medical doctors believe in. This theory says the virus can only be spread inside of droplets of water that are heavier than air and so these exhaled droplets will fall out of the air before reaching you if you're spread out by 6 ft or so.

Environmental Engineers and Aerosol Scientists (Linsey Marr, Kimberly Prather, Jose-Luis Jimenez, etc.) have been saying for at least a year that droplet spread theory is wrong. Instead, the EEs and Aerosol Scientists say the virus is lighter than air and so it also spreads as an aerosol. They say its like cigarette smoke - the virus particles will disperse throughout the entire room and will linger in the air long after the people who exhaled it have left the room. Just as you can't get away from cigarette smoke indoors by standing 6 feet away from a smoker, you can't avoid the virus by simply standing 6 feet apart from others indoors. Instead you need to have the high quality KN95 and N95 masks and indoor air quality has to be improved with more ventilation and HEPA filters.

I had to take a couple of Environmental Engineering classes in college, so the aerosol spread theory just makes a lot of sense to me.

"As of August 2, 2021, more than 164 million people in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19."

"During the same time, CDC received reports from 49 U.S. states and territories of 7,525 patients with COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infection who were hospitalized or died."

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/h ... cases.html

Which is .049% of people vaccinated, being hospitalized or died with breakthrough infections.

I assume covid can be transmitted via droplets of exhaled water as well as aerosols. So only an N-95 mask worn without gaps or in other words air tight, will stop the aerosols from being exhaled into the surrounding air. No thanks. Unless I have to, because of some regulation.

The number and severity of “breakthrough” cases for vaxxed individuals in Israel right now is staggering, btw.