[ 2021-02-16 ]

Passengers wearing face masks on a flight from Cairo to Sharm El-Skeikh, Egypt, in September

Are planes as Covid-safe as the airlines say?
The vaccinations have begun, but so have the
coronavirus mutations. We may be able to limit
Covid-19 but it’s going to be around, as UK
government chief scientific adviser Patrick
Vallance says, “probably forever”.

So will we be able to fly again without fear of
infection? How safe can we feel sitting shoulder
to shoulder with strangers for hours in a sealed
tube? Pretty safe, according to the Harvard TH
Chan School of Public Health, which says we have
less chance of contracting Covid-19 on an aircraft
than almost anywhere else.

The school’s Aviation Public Health Initiative
says that modern planes’ ventilation systems,
with their high efficiency particulate air (Hepa)
filters, remove more than 99.97 per cent of the
nasty stuff, including bacteria and viruses. Its
report, published in October, says the result is
cleaner air than in our offices or shopping
centres.

If someone coughs or sneezes in a plane,
“contaminants released in such events are fully
flushed from the cabin in as little as two to five
minutes, as opposed to some six hours in a
commercial or retail space,” the report says.
Some readers have emailed me expressing doubts
about Hepa filters, and their scepticism will rise
when they hear that the Harvard report was
sponsored by airlines, aircraft manufacturers and
airport operators.

The Harvard specialists insist their findings were
unaffected by the funding. Is there any evidence
that their report is wrong? One case of possible
in-flight contamination was a Vietnam Airlines
flight from London to Hanoi in March last year,
after which 16 passengers and crew tested positive
for Covid-19.

In a paper published in November, a team of
Vietnam and Australia-based researchers say there
is strong evidence that a 27-year old Vietnamese
businesswoman, who had been in Milan and Paris
before coming to London, passed the infection to
others while on board. The likelihood of in-flight
transmission was strengthened by their discovery
that 11 of the 15 others infected were sitting
within two seats of her in business class.

The Harvard report says that Hepa filtration needs
to be supplemented by other anti-infection
measures, including mask wearing. The Vietnamese
researchers concede they have no data on
mask-wearing on the London-Hanoi flight and that
face coverings were neither mandatory nor widely
used on planes back in March.

More concerning is a study of a flight into
Ireland last summer, after which 13 passengers
tested positive for Covid-19. A study by
researchers from Ireland’s public health
department found that mask-wearing was widely
observed on board the seven-hour flight, which was
only 17 per cent full. Although some of the
passengers might have been exposed during
overnight transfer stops or in lounges before the
flight, on-board transmission appeared to be the
only possibility in four cases.

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There are very few similar examples of proven
in-flight transmission. Given the air filters’
effectiveness, we should probably be more worried
about proximity to infected people at the airport,
in immigration queues or getting on and off the
plane. When I contacted FT journalists worldwide
who had recently flown, most suggested that
mask-wearing on-board was widely observed,
although one colleague on return flights between
London and Warsaw said many passengers’ masks
didn’t cover their noses, and some sipped from
cans to avoid wearing masks at all.

The real problem, reported by colleagues in the
US, UK, France, Italy and Russia, was getting on
and off the aircraft. The Harvard study recommends
airlines strictly control boarding and leaving the
plane. Colleagues described getting on and off as,
variously, a “joke”, “no respect” and “a
total shitshow”. Passport control was often the
same.

Sitting in a plane probably presents few dangers
of infection. It’s what happens before and after
that are the real problems.

Michael Skapinker will be hosting a live
discussion on post-Brexit business travel at the
FT Weekend Digital Festival in March

Source - FT, UK

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