A study suggests air travel may not be so safe after all. A flight into Ireland is described as the cause of 59 new coronavirus infections.
Written content by DW
Authorities in Ireland may advise against air travel at Christmas, following a study suggesting 59 confirmed cases of COVID-19 could be traced back to a flight into the country during the summer months.
Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tony Holohan, has said “the risk of non-essential travel outside [the] country is simply too high at this moment.”
In the study, published by Eurosurveillance, positive cases of SARS-CoV-2 were detected in passengers and contacts of passengers.
The flight into Ireland lasted seven-and-a-half hours. But it was only 17% occupied — 49 passengers on a 283-seat airplane. There were 12 crew members.
“Thirteen cases were passengers on the same flight to Ireland, each having transferred via a large international airport, flying into Europe from three different continents,” write the study authors.
On the flight itself, passengers appear to have been relatively well distanced, apart from those people who may have been traveling as a group.
Some passengers reported spending up to 12 hours overnight in a transit lounge during a stopover, some shared a separate transit lounge, and others had separate short waits of under 2 hours in airport departure areas.
So, air travel isn’t safe after all?
The Eurosurveillance findings appear to contradict previous advice that air travel on commercial flights is safe.
Airlines have been hit hard by the pandemic. Figures published by statista.com show the number of scheduled flights worldwide was down by 45.8 percent as of October 26, 2020, compared to the week of October 28, 2019.
As a result, there have been concerted efforts to boost public confidence in air travel.
There will have been an estimated 20 million flights by year end, which is still a significant number as it pertains to that single flight into Ireland and its 59 infections. We’re only talking about one flight out of millions, and only 59 people out of about a billion potential annual air travelers.
The report authors say themselves, that they “describe an outbreak that demonstrates in-flight transmission, providing further evidence to the small number of published studies in this area.” Our italics.
It’s also unclear whether the main point — or points — of viral transmission were the flight or busy airports, or both.
In a briefing, updated on October 21, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says “most viruses and other germs do not spread easily on flights because of how air circulates and is filtered on airplanes.”
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However, it goes onto say that “air travel requires spending time in security lines and airport terminals, which can bring you in close contact with other people and frequently touched surfaces. […] Social distancing is difficult on crowded flights and sitting within 6 feet [1.8 meters] of others, sometimes for hours, may increase your risk of getting COVID-19.”
Meanwhile, on October 8, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said “the risk of a passenger contracting COVID-19 while onboard [an airplane] appears very low.”
The IATA’s Medical Advisor, Dr. David Powell, said that “with only 44 identified potential cases of flight-related transmission among 1.2 billion travelers, that’s one case for every 27 million travelers. We recognize that this may be an underestimate but even if 90% of the cases were unreported, it would be one case for every 2.7 million travelers. We think these figures are extremely reassuring.”
Further research on in-flight transmission
An article on MIT Medical, which is associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says air quality on commercial flights is “quite high” because it’s refreshed regularly, within every five minutes.
Air circulation on airplanes moves from the top down and then out — it enters the cabin via overhead vents and exits via the floor. Some of that air is dumped outside and the rest is filtered using a hospital-grade system known as high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. That filtered air is then mixed with fresh air from outside the airplane before it’s introduced into the cabin. Read more from DW
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