Poll: Half Say They Are ‘Comfortable’ with Domestic Air Travel Two Years After Start of the Pandemic

Half of Americans say they are “comfortable” with domestic air travel over two years after the start of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, a Morning Consult survey found.

While the survey shows that comfort with domestic air travel has increased slightly — two points over the last week — just 50 percent say they are comfortable doing so. However, in the big picture, that is the highest percentage in the last year, as 50 percent also said the same in early March. But in February 2021, just 25 percent said they were comfortable with domestic air travel, with the percentage slowly increasing over the last year. 

Comfort with international air travel, the survey shows, is lagging, as 37 percent say they are comfortable doing so. 

Americans’ comfort with other modes of transportation, however, are even higher. Sixty-nine percent, for example, are comfortable renting a car, 55 percent are comfortable traveling by train, and 80 percent are comfortable taking a road trip. 

Americans seem to be the least comfortable with international travel, as well as taking a bus, as 46 percent expressed comfort with the latter. 

The surveys are taken weekly among roughly 2,200 U.S. adults and have a margin of error of +/- 2 percent.

It comes as the Biden White House and U.S. health officials consider extending the federal mask mandate for public transportation yet again, as it is currently set to expire in less than a week, on April 18, 2022. 

“This is a decision that the CDC director, Dr. Walensky, is going to make,” White House coronavirus czar Ashish Jha said this week. “I know the CDC is working on developing a scientific framework for how to answer that. We’re going to see that framework come out, I think, in the next few days.”

“And based on that, we’re going to want to be guided by this decision. Throughout the entire pandemic, we’ve wanted to make decisions based on the evidence and science. And that is what I expect we’ll do again this week,” he said, adding that an extension is “absolutely on the table.”