I have a friend who recently went on vacation. Within a day after arriving she got sick (cold/flu). She decided to come home.
I can certainly understand wanting to be back home and not paying a couple hundred dollars a day to sleep and be miserable. But, I can’t help but think about the poor people she will come across as she makes her way home (flying and taxis and mass transit even a ferry boat).
What is the right thing to do? What would you do?
I think it depends on a few factors, including the specific illness and the circumstances of the traveler. On one hand, if flu and COVID tests are negative, I have no objection to travelling home as long as the traveler respects masking and distancing as much as possible.
OTOH, if it’s COVID or a flu, the traveler should stay put and isolate per CDC guidelines (5 days?). However, I have some empathy for people who may be financially challenged by the costs of an extended hotel stay in isolation. All just IMO, of course.
I’d stay at the hotel until I had reason to think I was less contagious (keeping in mind how to protect hotel staff and visitors also, of course). Forgoing housekeeping, staying in the room, masking to open the door to accept room service, etc. I’d certainly notify the housekeeping manager that I’d been ill and their staff needing to take extra precautions to protect themselves as well as they need to deep clean my room after I leave.
Usually last minute airline ticket changes are extremely expensive, perhaps as costly as paying for a hotel room a few nights. So, I’d sit tight. I feel a moral/ethical obligation to protect all others, even strangers.
If I could just get in a car, mine or a rental and drive home, that I would do. Flying, ferrying, subway, busing, no. Using a cab or ride share? Only if I warned them first and still took every single precaution (masking, windows open, handwashing, etc)
Wear a mask and go home.
For other passengers and airline employees it’s a wash. You roll the dice.
This would be my strategy.
I would wear a mask and go home.
But I would wait until the scheduled departure because if I am that sick I am not navigating the hellscape that is changing travel arrangements.
In general, I would always recommend rest. The fatigue and hassle of flying will only make it worse. Sleep it off, rest, wait til you feel better.
But if your job or something demands that you must get home ASAP, you may have less choice.
Substantially 100% of your fellow Americans will fly while contagiously sick. You (any you) doing or not doing the same is a drop in the bucket.
Do what works for you and ignore any consideration of others. It’s the 'Murrican Way.
Back when COVID was in full swing and mostly pre-vaccine, many ill travelers did hole up in hotels. Crew were required to. At which point hotels became hotbeds of contagion to their low-paid staff who had to come to work sick or become homeless. So they kept passing it among themselves and to the next crop of travelers to pass through.
It would depend on a combination of how sick I felt and how contagious I was.
Even if I was not contagious, or if I could mask sufficiently to protect others, it wouldn’t take much to keep me off a commercial airliners. If I felt at all crappy there’s no way I could sit in a bog-standard economy seat.
I would have no problem staying in a hotel room and doing nothing for the remainder of a vacation.
That can take a while. Viral load spikes and then plummets with flu, but it climbs slowly and lingers with covid. I had a lot of tests handy when i had covid. The day the CDC said “good to go out again” was the day my viral load was highest, and i was likely the very most contagious. (Yeah, I’m cranky that the CDC picked flu-appropriate guidelines for all respiratory bugs.)
Am i too sick to travel? Is it prohibitely expensive to get home early? Then i hunker down in my hotel, hang the “do not disturb sign” and ask room service to leave my food outside the door. Do i feel well enough to travel? Can i change my flight? I was my hands carefully, wear clean clothes and a well-fitted n95 mask from my room until I’m home, only raising the mask (and holding my breath) when TSA requires i do so.
My sister got very sick with Covid on a business trip (not a vacation) about a year ago. She had to go to a local hospital. So she had no choice but to hunker down until she was well enough to travel.
You could move to a less expensive hotel, if all you are going to be able to do is stay in and mostly sleep. You can get meal deliveries from outside if they don’t have room service (and anyway, that is also cheaper). This could be a bit tricky ethically, since the new hotel might not want you there if you are sick, so you probably would not be able to tell them until some time after you are checked in. The original hotel probably also does not want you there. The ethics of this is something you would have to figure out for yourself.
I think the overall risk of this is less to other people than flying home. Distancing is almost impossible in airplanes, even with masks.
Not sure I follow the logic here?
Worth remembering that most commercial airliners have HEPA-level filtration (2pp PDF):
That, and an N95 on you/me (NOT removed to eat/drink) make for pretty good odds for your fellow passengers, generally speaking.
Masks, used properly to contain germs, are a lot more effective than distancing. Surgical masks were invented to keep surgeons from breathing germs into vulnerable, cut-open patients immediately in front of them. A well-fitted n95 mask, without a vent, works very well for that.
I don’t doubt what you say, but it is not necessary. When my son wanted to visit us in 2021, the Canadian govt. insisted he quarantine for 5 days in a hotel and then get a covid test. Even though he had just tested negative, he had essentially no interaction with the staff. I guess he did check in, but they brought him meals and left them outside his door. He put the empty dishes outside his door and they cleared them later. On the fifth day, he did Uber over to a test centre and got a negative test, after which I drove over to the hotel (which was right by the airport) and picked him. His time there wasn’t wasted since he had been working remotely since March of 2020 and just continued to. (Should have declared his income and paid Canadian taxes on it? I suppose so but he didn’t).
That’s great, as long as you don’t eat or drink during your several-hour flight. That’s the part (the need to remove your mask even briefly and only occasionally, when sitting right next to someone) that I was thinking about.
Yeah, it matters how long the flight is.
In my friend’s case the flight was something like 90-120 minutes long. With mass transit/taxis and whatnot on both sides.
Yep. Flying home means a whole airplane will be exposed- not to mention all those people in the terminals, etc.
And stay 6 feet away from anyone else? On an airplane?
I won’t.
Good ideas.
Can you get one of those easily? I mean those cheap ones are easy to get, but those? I guess a solid drug store would have them. And on a long flight…
And if you explain this to the hotel, and hang up the sign, etc, I bet they will give you a break on the room.
And Target, CVS, Lowes, Home Depot, Staples, Walmart, Ace Hardware. That’s near me (4 of them are within 2 miles-one I could easily walk to) and I’m hardly in a vacation or metropolitan business center. 3M brand for instance makes an easily recognizable version.