![]() ![]() But your chances of getting sick don’t stay the same during the course of the flight, Joseph Allen, a Harvard public-health professor who studies ventilation, told me. On one trip from London to Hanoi in early March 2020, a sick passenger in business class wound up spreading COVID to 14 travelers and one crew member. Indeed, people have caught the virus while on planes, especially on flights without mask mandates. In such quarters, and given current infection rates, you’re very likely to have at least one sick person on board. Otherwise, you’re free to breathe about the cabin.Ī commercial flight might seem like the scariest possible setup for super-spreading COVID: Hundreds of strangers who have been God-knows-where over the past few days cram into a metal tube for hours on end. Call it “airplane mode” for your face: Keep your mask in place until your plane is in the air, and then put it on again after you land. Something like the same principle could work for masking, too. Those crucial few minutes-first when you’re boarding the plane, and then after you’ve landed-account for only a sliver of your travel time, but they are by far the riskiest for breathing in viral particles.Įveryone already knows to switch off cellphone service when their flight is about to leave the gate, and then to turn it on the second they’ve landed. Here’s the cheat code: Instead of masking up for your whole flight, just cover up at the start and end of it. But what if I told you that there’s a third option here-a way to split the difference between going bare-faced on a plane and never taking off that N95? And that this strategy lets you nearly max out your COVID protection with just a tiny fraction of the annoyance? Enduring the discomfort of wearing a mask for the sake of lowering your risk, and everybody else’s, is a tough ask, especially when the risk of getting COVID seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. Masking up for many hours on a flight is, to use a technical term, a pain. “Depending on the destination, as little as 20 percent of passengers are wearing masks.” “Since the mask mandate ended, I’ve flown to Europe, I’ve flown to New York, I’ve flown to Dallas–Fort Worth, and I’ve flown to a couple more places,” Henry Harteveldt, an airline-industry analyst, told me last month. ![]() Mask wearing is no longer required by major airlines in the U.S., and as anyone who has flown recently can tell you, even in a month of crowded summer travel and the rapid spread of BA.5, Americans are done with masks. I did not end up getting COVID, though perhaps I got lucky. And this flight, scheduled for a Wednesday evening in early June, felt more stressful than it had to be. Since getting vaccinated, I haven’t exactly built my life around avoiding COVID-but still, I’d rather not get sick. They were sputtering, throaty noises like nothing I have heard before: Less your usual ack and more like huh-khleagggghhh. As we sat on the JFK tarmac for a solid two hours, a maskless woman directly in front of me didn’t stop coughing. ![]() Because of “bad weather” and “air traffic,” the departure time got pushed back … and again … and again. My time on Delta Airlines 5308, seat 17B, sent my cortisol levels through the roof.
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