I get opinions on air travel that are all over the place - it’s near-suicidal! it’s quite harmless!..
Have there been solid sources by now on how safe it is to fly? i.e., 1 million have flown but only a dozen got infected? Etc. My main worry isn’t the aircraft cabins but the TSA screening, etc. They don’t apparently clean anything or avoid contamination.
There is no “solid data” on air travel because almost no one is traveling.
I would assume that any TSA security checkpoint is going to be a choke point for contagion and try to protect accordingly, including demanding a regloving if a TSA agent insists upon [DEL]groping[/DEL]frisking you, treating all luggage as potentially contaminated after going through either the checkpoint or checked luggage, and wearing a respirator mask onboard the aircraft. Most airlines have stopped in-flight food and beverage service (although I’ve heard instances of still serving beverages in first class) and I would certainly avoid using the toilet unless absolutely necessary. I know there have been some instances of people getting irate about physical distancing on the aircraft, but frankly you are going to be within six feet of people regardless, and in a sealed aircraft for an hour or more you can just assume that you are going to be breathing the exhaled breath of all of the people around you irrespective of the filtering of air by the planes’ HVAC system.
Stranger
Pre-shutdown, were there any instances of infections of air passengers? I would guess that some infected people had to be flying at that time, either in the US or in other countries. If some clusters came from air travel, I would expect that there would be some findings from countries which were doing detailed contact tracing. Just off the top of my head I don’t recall hearing of any.
I do know that many clusters came from people who had traveled and then brought the virus back home. The most common instance seemed to be people who caught it on a ski trip and spread the virus after they got back. But I don’t remember hearing that other people on their flight caught it.
I also remember hearing of a chartered spring break trip some college students took to Cabo where lots of them got infected, but I had the impression the infection happened in Cabo rather than on their flight.
Another thing to look at would be the infection rate of flight attendants. Since they are in that environment for hours a day, it seems like they would be a high risk for catching it. That would be even more the case pre-shutdown when no one was wearing masks.
Thanks. Is there any reason to believe air travel will be safer in months ahead, or is it already as safe as can be?
500 TSA workers and 100 American Airlines flight attendants have gotten it, so it’s definitely being brought to airports.
It’s not likely to become materially safer until (a) there’s a vaccine, and you get it, or (b) levels of infection in the community are signficantly reduced, so you are simply much less likely to encounter an infected person on the aircraft.
Maybe we can use that info to extrapolate the chance of infection by flying. That article was written on 4/7. American Airlines has about 25000 flight attendants. Attendants fly about 65-90 hours per month. So maybe between 1625000 and 2250000 attendant flight hours per month. If only 100 attendants got infected even with all those flight hours, it seems like the chance of catching it while flying is pretty small.
Domestic flights have decreased to a small fraction of what has flown in previous years (I can’t get firm numbers but certainly less than 20% of normal) and international flights are less than 1% if normal, and even then most flights are underbooked to the point that many airlines have complained that they are losing money on the flights the continue to operate. So you would need to factor both the reduction in flights and the less crowded aircraft in addition to the efficacy of any protective measures such as wearing masks and additional sterilization procedures.
Stranger
As you point out, that article is from more than a month and a half ago, and I suspect the attendant flight hours / month are significantly lower now. I’d probably want to see more - and more-recent - data before reaching the conclusion you did.
Unless they later found out something different, there was a case in Vietnam of a 20-something female (and her sister, perhaps?) bringing the virus back home on a flight from London, and they believe a dozen or so others were infected on the flight, I think it was. She was flying in the business cabin, for what it’s worth. I remember this was kinda big news at the time, because they were getting close to zero new cases and were likely to lift their lockdown that weekend if it hadn’t happened, or something like that.
The Australian Airline Qantus has claimed zero cases of inflight transmission, despite running repatriation flights with passengers who later had confirmed infection, and some cases of flight-crew infection.
But it’s not entirely safe: on 2 February, a Vietnamese American (#7) got infected with coronavirus, during a two-hour layover in Wuhan airport during his trip from the US.
Vietnam was one of the early reporter (?? “THE” early reporter ??) of human-to-human infection, including family and friends of people who had flown home, so there was a lot of publicity when they had close to zero cases and the cases were caught from people who flew in, but I can’t remember any cases that were attributed to in-flight infection.
Here’s the article that reported the early findings. I’m not sure what might have changed since then, though.
And here’s another that sheds a little more light. This is what really got the lockdown started in Vietnam, I think.
And here is one that connects a bunch of cases from that flight (and others). It seems to suggest that the flight attendants were infected?
I understand that what happened is that they determined that the multiple cases from that flight were all unconnected, stemming from infections in the places of origin.
There is another set of early cases all linked to members of the same “training crew”. I can’t read Vietnamese, and never worked out what kind of “training crew” that was: it’s possible that it might be a flight crew (or a dance crew), and it would be interesting to find what kind of “training” they were engaged in.
Question for those who know more about TSA stuff:
Given that hijackings are so absolutely rare, what if TSA didn’t make people pass their belongings into bins, take off shoes, coats, etc. and just had everyone and their luggage walk through the 360-degree scanners? Prevent a lot of virus cross-contamination this way.