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Comment by imjared | Hacker News Reader

I was hesitant to fly early this summer. As months ticked on, I didn't see any news about full flights getting infected in the way I would expect. I've seen countless stories of "x people went to event and 90% got Covid a week later" but as far as I could discern, almost nothing like that had come from flying. I chose to fly with a carrier (Delta) that I felt was handling the situation more responsibly by blocking middle seats. I'll say that the whole experience felt pretty fine. Airlines and airports have taken reasonable precautions at every step of the experience and I'll say I felt substantially more comfortable flying (except for wearing a mask for ~10 hours) than I've felt doing other risky activities like dining outside or going for a run/bike ride on a crowded trail in the park.

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> I didn't see any news about full flights getting infected in the way I would expect.

In order to see such a story, someone would have had to do contact-tracing of a large number of people with covid back to a single flight they all were on. Given the haphazard nature of contact tracing (in the U.S. at least) it is quite plausible that large-scale transmission events on airplanes are happening but simply aren't being noticed because we're not looking for them.

That said, the ventilation in planes is pretty good, and if everyone is wearing a mask it's equally plausible that air travel is relatively safe.

Air travel is objectively more dangerous than any outdoor activity. There are multiple credible traced studies of transmission on planes, and there remain very few (really almost none) detailing outdoor activity of any kind.

As with anything else, including sitting in a restaurant or bar, any single flight is unlikely to infect you and statistically "safe" from the perspective of individual risk. But air travel is absolutely spreading this disease.

The whole notion of treating a pandemic via the lens of individual risk ("will I get sick if I do this one thing") is broken analysis, of course. But at this point I despair of our ever being able to free ourselves of that nonsense. It's just too ingrained.

>but as far as I could discern, almost nothing like that had come from flying

How would you determine this without solid contact-tracing? Nearly all of the cases where I'm at are associated with "international travel", so at least some of that has to come from planes.

Good to know. I understand they exchanging the air with the outside every couple of minutes now, too, which seems very smart.

That's not new. Air changes per hour on pressurized airliners have always been in the 10-20 changes per hour (typically 12-15).

More changes costs some incremental fuel (as it siphons pressurized bleed air), but the effect is quite small.

I had read it was 4 times an hour prior to covid.

That’s office building territory. Airplanes have always been higher.

Airliners have always exchanged air fairly rapidly; if they didn’t 250 people in a small space would rapidly suffocate.

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