1. I had to change my mind about going backcountry camping because the removal of the mask mandate *during a surge* meant that the risk of symptomatic infection, which would have ruined my trip, was too high. Unfortunately it's a trip that had to be planned well in advance, so even though I suspect it will be safe by the time we were going to go...we would already have been past the window of getting our money back and travel insurance won't reimburse you for *concern* about getting sick.

2. Vacating the order means the CDC can't put it back if we get another immune-evading variant. Or ten years from now in the next pandemic. You agree that mask mandates are good if we *need* them, right? In fact, your very argument is that it will be harder to control any future pandemic if we keep them in place. If we make it *illegal to mandate them* then...

3. Masks are a very, very small ask. Very small. One way masking does work, but it doesn't work as well as universal masking. Yes, they are annoying, but the cost-benefit is remarkable.

This isn't about virtue signaling, this is about one inexperienced and incompetent judge risking all of our lives if there's another surge.

And about the fact that when traveling you DO want to avoid any infection right now, because you don't want it to ruin your trip! Next year things will likely be different. (Some people might have a different risk-benefit ratio, of course, I'm not arguing against travel).

No, I don't want to put my life on hold, and for the most part I'm not, but this has slowed my ability to actually move on down. Wearing a mask in high risk situations such as airports is NOT acting as if it's April 2020, it's acting as if it's not quite over yet, because it's not. Case numbers are currently going up.

We won't need the federal mandate after this surge for a while, but there is a non-zero chance we will need it again and thanks to this excuse for a judge we can't use it at all now. I'm not quite sure you're grasping that vacating the order removes mask mandates from the CDC's purview *permanently* no matter what happens. Thus the need to appeal even if it's not a big deal at this precise moment...although I think it is because again, *case numbers are going up*. And they are going up faster than we know because a lot of people aren't testing and most of those who are are using at home tests and not reporting the results. (Which is why it's time to use hospitalizations as a measure).