Name: Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic?
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA

Carlisle Companies

Viking

NOVA Science Trust Logo

The CDC advises people to avoid travel for the 2020 holidays due to COVID-19 surges.

If you do have to fly, here's what to expect.

The CDC advises people to avoid travel for the 2020 holidays due to COVID-19 surges.

Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic?

If you do have to fly, here's what to expect.

Body & Brain

Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic?Published: December 8, 2020Narrator: Is it safe to fly now?Annalies Wilder-Smith: To be honest, my advice is minimize air travel, minimize contact with people. We have a pandemic. In 6 or 12 months, the pandemic will be over.Carina Marquez: It’s really balancing the risks and the benefits of travel for the individual. I would say right now, as cases are surging throughout the United States that those risks are higher. It’s important to think about the family member that you’re seeing and how vulnerable they are to severe manifestations of COVID, how vulnerable you are to COVID.Narrator: The most vulnerable people are those who are older and who have certain underlying medical conditions. Including: diabetes, heart conditions, obesity, smoking, a weak immune system. Risks of travel go up with the infection rates at your point of origin and your destination. But what if you do fly?Marquez: Transmission on an airplane does happen, but the relative number of cases reported on airplanes is on the lower side. So I think with good precautions, you can really work to minimize the risk.Narrator: The most important way to reduce your risk:Wilder-Smith: Face masks. Use them consistently, correctly, and use a well-fitting face mask of high quality.Narrator: Face masks are crucial, because the primary way COVID spreads is through tiny droplets in our breath. These can hang in the air for hours, making indoor spaces especially dangerous. A well-fitting mask is snug around your nose and chin with no large gaps around the edges. You want your breath to be filtered through the mask, not flowing in and out around it. And when it comes to quality, the tighter the fabric’s weave, the more protection it provides.Marquez: If you as a passenger are masking, if your other passengers are also masking, this is very, very important. Wearing masks reduces your droplet spread and contains it.Wilder-Smith: I personally would not eat on a flight because I would not want to take off my mask.Narrator: Which brings us to how you should behave on a plane...Wilder-Smith: So the nature of this virus is that it’s driven by contact duration, contact proximity, and contact frequency.Narrator: And right now, with cases soaring, each of these factors is elevated.Wilder-Smith: When people are close together, there is a risk. So minimize contacts, do not talk to people. Ideally, never ever use a middle seat.Marquez: Making sure you’re traveling with hand sanitizer and not touching your face or your eyes.Narrator: Airplane cabins might be safer than most indoor spaces.Wilder-Smith: The ventilation on airplane is thought to be better than the ventilation indoors, which is stagnant. Narrator: The air you breathe inside a plane is a mix of outside air and recirculated cabin air. Along the lengths of most aircraft, the air enters from overhead outlets, flows downwards, and leaves through grills near the floor. There’s very little forward and backward movement of the air. In addition, every few minutes, the air is pushed through a hospital-grade, HEPA air filter. While the plane is cruising, the volume of air in the cabin is exchanged every couple minutes.Marquez: Not only are the airplane filters very effective at filtering out coronavirus, it is also helpful in terms of how the ventilation flows. This helps really to decrease the risk of transmission.Wilder-Smith: But the issue is when you board or at the time of exit, often they turn off the engines and then the ventilation may stop.Narrator: Getting on and off the aircraft can pose the highest risk.Wilder-Smith: Waiting in your lines, at security. And then there’s always a rush when you exit. There’s crowding. I think the risk is much higher in these settings.Marquez: Certainly being in an environment where others are masking and as much as possible maintaining six feet social distancing will certainly decrease those risks.Narrator: In the lead up to your trip, try to minimize exposure. And we should stress — if you have COVID or you think you might have been exposed, you should not be flying.Wilder-Smith: Symptomatic persons should not be traveling, they should not be in airplanes, they should be at home safe, self-isolating, full stop. Therefore, transmission that is still occurring is then because of asymptomatics.Narrator: It’s estimated that up to 40% of people infected with the coronavirus have no symptoms at all.Marquez: A simple symptom screen or doing temperature measurements, while important, won’t catch all the people who are infected.Narrator: Due to the high risk of asymptomatic and presymptomatic spread, some airports and airlines are offering rapid onsite or at-home testing before you board — for some flights.Wilder-Smith: They are not yet perfect. And they may not detect all cases, but testing is the way forward to make sure that you do not spread it also from one country to the other, from one state to the other, one city to the other.Narrator: Testing passengers after they leave the plane and screening wastewater from an aircraft that’s just landed won’t stop the spread of COVID. But they can help with contact tracing.Marquez: If you want to be extra cautious, quarantine after you arrive.Narrator: Right now, COVID-19 is surging across the US. Chances are higher now than at any other time during the pandemic, that someone on your flight will be infected — even if they don’t know it. And it could be you.Wilder-Smith: If we take precautions, I think we can minimize the risk of in-flight transmission.Marquez: That being said, it’s not a zero risk. And so everybody needs to factor that into their decisions about travel.Narrator: And perhaps more dangerous than flying is the act of getting together with friends and family. Small gatherings have become increasingly responsible for the spread of coronavirus.Wilder-Smith: Wait it out. Next year will be better.

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future. (Premiered February 2, 2022)

In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.

Arctic Sinkholes

The top half of Jupiter in blue and green against a night sky

A composite image of Jupiter using images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt.

Explore the cosmos, delve into ancient history, and follow an extreme rescue with NOVA’s most-watched documentaries released in 2022.

NOVA’s most popular science documentaries of 2022

Four bright orange loops brand off of a dark blue blob

A transmission electron micrograph of HIV-1 virus particles (orange) replicating from the plasma membrane of an infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID, Flickr

Scientists have cured a handful of people of HIV by piggybacking on treatments they received for blood cancer. But does that bring a widespread cure any closer?

Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic?

Support Provided By

Explore More

Decoding COVID-19

Why Antibody Tests Don’t Yet Reveal Coronavirus Immunity

How Coronavirus Tests Work

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By

Explore More

Decoding COVID-19

Why Antibody Tests Don’t Yet Reveal Coronavirus Immunity

How Coronavirus Tests Work