LSLGuy
November 18, 2020, 6:49pm
194
On the topic of workplace precautions, here’s a post I wrote a couple weeks ago in another thread. Short version: Masks deliver very obvious statistically relevant benefits when compliance is high enough. Which it is emphatically NOT in most of the USA most of the time.
I work for a big airline. We have multiple tens of thousands of pilots and flight attendants. It’s a LOT of people. They travel in public every day all over the US and a bunch outside the US. When on-duty everybody, but especially FAs, are stuck in close proximity to crowds of other humans indoors in airports and on airplanes. When off-duty on the road they’re eating in restaurants and staying in hotel rooms that somebody else slept in last night. Of necessity they touch vast amounts of public and shared stuff from doorknobs to flush handles to keyboards to … And they’re exposed to a never-ending randomly selected cross-section of (mostly US-based) humanity. Actually they’re not exposed to a random selection of humanity. The passengers flying are heavily selected from the less sequestered more risk tolerant part of the populace.
And of course they also have whatever exposures they do in their daily home lives, going shopping, dealing with kids in school, and everything else that the rest of America deals with.
With all that incremental scary exposure above and beyond that of e.g. the OP, how much more disease are we suffering versus the country as a whole? We’re suffering less.
Our weekly statistics show that we, the crew force, have (a little) less COVID than the US at large. This has been true every week since the beginning. Our numbers ebb and flow about in sync with the US totals, but always lower. Despite much more aggressive monitoring and testing than is the US average.
Why are our numbers better? IMO it’s simple: we all wear masks seriously and we wash hands regularly, at least while on the road . And many, but by no means all of the flying public does the same at least while they’re flying , if not the moment they get outside the airport. We certainly have our share of anti-maskers while off duty.
If 10s of thousands of people can spend about 2 weeks of every month hanging out on airplanes and in hotels and restaurants and still not get sick, …
Then apparently wearing masks in that situation works. As long as substantially everybody else around you does too.