Protected by masks on a 100-percent full flight

by philg

Readers may recall that I’ve been an advocate for preventing airlines from selling middle seats during coronapanic, rather than relying on masks to block the spread of germs (see Coronavirus will breathe life into my two-thirds-full airline idea? (3/23/2020) and Science proves that I’m right: airlines should leave the middle seat empty (4/16/2021)).

As I type this, a friend is on a 100-percent packed flight back to Boston from a ski vacation. He’s never been especially concerned about COVID-19, so his voluntary leisure travel does not make him a hypocrite (see If at least 50 percent of us are Covid-righteous, how did hotels and flights fill up with leisure travelers?).

Here are his instant messages, enabled by Delta’s WiFi ($5 fee):

  • A woman next to me on the plane has been sneezing into her mask for 4 hours now. She takes it off, blows her nose profusely and puts it back on.
  • The man across from me is coughing all the time.
  • You can hear people sniffling.
  • I can identify at least four different people sniffling one after the other.
  • It is a COVID symphony
  • String quartet maybe
  • The cello just took off his mask and blew his nose
  • Somebody just sounded like he snorted a quart of snot and then coughed five times loudly

11 thoughts on “Protected by masks on a 100-percent full flight”

  2. What airlines should do is to figure out a way to provide useful air flow inside the cabin. Not the little vents on the top usually offering the air approximating winter weather in Alaska — and now quite a few new planes miss them completely. Not the completely dry air from outside. Something which feels like decent warm weather outdoors. Dry air allows these tiny virion-laden aerosols to stay around. Then… provide some UVA. Nothing like levels needed to immediately sterilize everything, but getting rid of viruses within 10sec or so. Ionization would help too. And for God’s sake, teach crews to set cabin thermostat to something comfortable without top coat on.

  3. Leaving the middle seat empty would devalue their business/first class, so the airlines won’t do it for a 50% premium.

    The primary business of airlines is miles loyalty programs and customer data collection, so cramming as many humans into cattle class while selling business/first class at outrageous prices is a sound strategy.

    Why do the politicians not forbid it? I do not think that authoritarian politicians want to stop COVID-19. Many “elite” members are quite happy if the riffraff stays at home, does not pollute the environment and is kept in fear while playing computer games and clicking on Facebook ads:

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passenger-traffic-globally/

  4. Anyway, these were Omicron coughs. As we learned at our recent trip to Florida, Omicron is extremely virulent. Entire plane was sneezing on the way home. Then these kids will go to school and in January we’ll have huge Omicron wave everywhere. Prepare for hysteria.

    On the bright guy side symptoms are like common cold and sore throat, so most people wouldn’t even know they had it. We wouldn’t know we had it if I didn’t insist on dipping into our dwindling test supply while wife insisted on keeping them for when “we really need it”.

    (Why is it impossible to buy Binaxnow tests anywhere? I grabbed some last ones in remote Walgreens in August, and since then it’s impossible to buy them.)

    • SK: The CVS in our neighborhood had about 20 BinaxNOW boxes (40 tests) in mid-December. I happened to be there right after my friend in Boston said it was impossible to arrange a test or buy an at-home kit (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/12/16/why-is-it-still-almost-impossible-to-schedule-a-covid-19-test-at-least-in-maskachusetts/ ). I bought 2, leaving 18 for the neighbors. I assume that they’re all sold out now.

      The good news is that Joe Biden promised to “ensure all Americans have access to regular, reliable, and free testing” and he would “Double the number of drive-through testing sites” and “Invest in next-generation testing, including at home tests and instant tests, so we can scale up our testing capacity by orders of magnitude.”

      https://joebiden.com/covid19/

      Maybe by “orders of magnitude” he meant that it would all be scaled up by -1 or -2 orders of magnitude?

  5. Meanwhile another great story: friends of friends flew to Cancun, got infected with Omicron, couldn’t fly back to US due to positive test.
    Flew to Tijuana, crossed border on foot, flew to Seattle from San Diego.

    I knew enter to US test requirements were stupid when they were introduced, this just confirms it.

    • If they had the right kind of travel insurance, they could have stayed in Cancun on the insurance company’s dime! I guess they really needed to get home. I have a friend who didn’t, and so she and her hubby just took an extra week’s vacation on the insurance company’s tab!

    • SK: That is a beautiful story! The folks you described followed the science wherever it led. It just so happened that it led to Tijuana! (Separately, I’m so old that I remember when Californians would go to Tijuana for debauchery, including marijuana to smoke. Now it is California that has the legal recreational marijuana, casual sex available 24/7 via Tinder, and government-provided opioids/needles/etc. The stuff that goes on in San Francisco and LA makes Tijuana look like a church picnic.)

      Alex: If the resort runs the test and you stay at the same resort for the quarantine, I think you’re pretty well locked into your room. It is not a vacation unless you love playing games on your phone.

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