How likely is it to catch COVID-19 on a flight?

Arnold Barnett, professor of statistics at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he calculated numbers to determine the actual likelihood of an airborne infection.

Professor Barnett’s study focused on a two-hour flight in the United States and considered the benefits of an empty middle seat. This is a measure some airlines have taken to maintain a social distance between passengers. CNN report.

It also assumes that everyone on board is wearing a mask, which is being increasingly enforced by many carriers as a policy.

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Aircraft with three seats on either side of the aisle, such as the Boeing 737, had a 1 in 4300 chance of getting the virus on a full flight.

When the middle seat was empty, the odds were 1 at 7700.

“Most things are now more dangerous than they were before COVID. Aviation is no exception,” Professor Barnett told CNN Travel.

“But in order for you to get infected (in flight), three things have to work out for you: You must have a COVID-19 patient on board and be contagious. If you have such a person in flight, assuming you are wearing a mask, you cannot prevent the infection.

“They also have to be close enough that you are at risk of suffering an infection.”

Professor Burnett said the odds are even lower on flights outside the United States with the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world.

Regarding seat selection, he said there was little difference in safety between the window and the central seat, but the aisle seats offered a little higher risk as there were more people. It was.

“You are at risk to people sitting next to you in the same row,” he told CNN. “And to a lesser extent, people in the back row and people in the front row.

“Statistically, window seats are a bit safer than the central seats and aisle seats of a full-fledged airplane. But that’s not a big difference.”

Globally, there are few known cases of COVID-19 infections in aircraft, according to a recent report. Wall Street Journal..

On the 31st March flight between the US and Taiwan, there were 12 symptomatic passengers, but contact tracking showed no in-flight transmission among the other 328 passengers.

Similarly, no symptomatic passengers were infected on a flight from China to Canada.

But that happens. A flight from London to Vietnam on March 2 may have infected 14 people sitting nearby.

How the virus spreads in the cabin

COVID-19 spreads from droplets from infected persons ingested through the mouth, nose and ears.

Aircraft ventilation systems are believed to be very good at controlling the diffusion of small aerosol particles.

The air breathing in the cabin of an airplane is a 50-50 mixture of outside air from inside the cabin and recirculating air, which passes through a hospital-grade HEPA filter that can remove at least 99.9% of bacterial and viral particles.

According to the BBC, airplane air can be completely replaced every 2-3 minutes, compared to every 10-12 minutes in an air-conditioned building.

“It’s now generally accepted that when a plane is in flight and the ventilation system is up, it does a great job of removing air of infectious particles,” said an infectious disease expert. Dr. Mark Gendrow said. Wall Street Journal..

However, ventilation systems are less effective at handling large droplets, so experts believe that a greater risk on an airplane is due to passengers coughing or sneezing nearby. This is why masks are so important.

However, a recent German study found that passengers were at the highest risk of getting COVID-19 during boarding and disembarking, not necessarily in flight.

A study found that passengers were in closer contact as they boarded and unloaded from planes as they lined up in the aisles, searching for seats and moving luggage into and out of the overhead compartments.

Dr David Powell, a medical adviser to the International Air Transport Association, told Bloomberg that the best thing passengers can do is to maintain good hygiene practices.

“Contrary to what people think, hands are the most efficient way for these viruses to spread,” Dr. Powell said.

“Top of the list is frequent hand washing, hand sanitization, or both.”