There's also habit destruction. The longer travel is subjected to these types of restrictions, the more people who were in the habit of travel, especially by aircraft, will decide to do something else, especially for leisure. Business travelers also will be impacted long term as companies have discovered that Zoom meetings can replace many (though not all) in person meetings. Trade shows were already in danger of dying but had inertia from the good times behind them. Probably half of pre-covid trade shows will never come back. Lots of long term demand destruction is being generated.

It could fix it. Some airlines may opt to serve fearful passengers by maintaining safety restrictions, while others would rather serve the risk takers and let passengers do as before the pandemic. or the same airliner having many flights per day for the same route could reasonably offer both options.

That's pretty much what happened before restaurants were forced to ban smoking altogether. There was non smoking areas and smoking areas, and some restaurants entirely non smoking, and some allowing smoking anywhere. I don't want those days back but it worked. it's not the most cost efficient but better than have half customers abandon the service altogether.

To open the possibility to see it work, restrictions as a blanket regulation first need to drop to let service providers and their customers base figure things out.

It's not ideal, but the current situation is even less ideal in term of business and also universal access to flight travel.

Why should the flight regulation be dropped? to me on the simple basis that it's perfectly legal for me to rent a van, take 11 other people with me and do a 17h road trip without anybody masked, without anyone vaccinated, nor tested. and I could charge for that trip. it isn't a perfect parallel but I doubt the spread risk is higher on a 4h flight than on a 17h van trip, probably the contrary.

Some could advocate to address the logical flaw and regulate van trips as well, the same advocates would then complain 6 months later that they see too many nearly empty vans on the road.

Opinions are debatable, and I don't engage in that debate there. Logic should be universal, I beg everyone to give some respect to logic whatever path we take.

I agree, but it a few months it won't matter. As omicron recedes (and barring the emergence of another scary variant) the segment of the population that remains frightened enough to stay off of places and out of restaurants will rapidly shrink into economic insignificance.

Until yet another variant is announced.

You could also take 17 people on the van without taking their luggage through an X-ray machine and they could take liquids on board. Doesn't seem to be a good parallel.

The comparaison with liquid ban and scanners isn't good rather, since they could argue that flight hijacking poses a far greater risk than a van hijacking.

But as we are on it... I'm not in favor of x-ray nor liquid ban, it is to note forcing an x-ray scan is illegal in many juridictions, travelers should be given the choice of going through traditional search if they wish to. So here as well the comparison makes no sense since x-ray isn't mandatory to travel. And it is a questionable measure due to potential health consequences for frequent travellers put through it.

No liquid is another absurdity that came up at the height of anti terrorism efforts, one guy managed to concoct an explosive with a small quantity of liquids and all liquid containers above a certain threshold got banned. At that rate bans could apply to all sort of common things to want to carry with us. Such as clothing since some clothes can be made highly inflammable. All it would take is one creative criminal to somewhat succeed with that and we will have to swap our clothes with airport issued garnements. It's a stretch, but since we have no choice, i bet most of us would tolerate the absurdity once in a while so that we can get to travel.

I think x-rays make economical sense for airports so it got adopted. Ban on liquids didn't get much push back because it made security checks simpler for airports and leads to far more water bottles sales past the checkpoints. Airports are first a business.