The cabin air is about half recirculated, half fresh air from the engines. But the recirculated air is filtered. An N95 mask can filter >95% of .3 micron particles, this cabin air filter can capture 99.9%.
HEPA filters really help you get pristine air quality.
Large commercial buildings and aircraft have them. More expensive cars, sometimes. For homes, I think most people don't have it. However, I imagine it might be more popular in some colder areas with central A/C units.
I have purchased two Philips purifiers...
In October, I bought the AC3259. We use it in the bedroom. It's great, and you can use the Air Matters application on your phone to see how the air quality of your place is. At the end of March, I bought the Philips AC3829/10. It's a purifier + humidifier unit and is more practical, and I use it in the living room.
Our apartment is only about 78 square meters, so using both is a little overkill, but we have a fluffy dog, so definitely, it's making a difference to our health.
We (two people + dog) spent most of the time in the living room these days, and we have to clean the purifier in the bedroom every day, but the one in the living room only about a week or so.
I'd recommend getting a large purifier with a HEPA filter to anyone concerned about their health these days.
1. There is no way you’re getting a right seal all the way through the purifier because if you did it would cost orders of magnitude more. So there is air being sucked in around the filter and along the way that mixes with the filtered air
2. I seem to remember virus (and smells or VOCs) are way too small to be caught by a hepa filter so they just float right through
3. Some filters have a uv light in them. But they’re inefficient because not all the air is exposed, the exposition duration is too short, and it generates ozone as a side effect (probably not great to breath in large quantities)
4. They do an ok job at catching dust particles for allergy sufferers and some of the pollen
1. Why does this matter? It's not going in a window and the room is not sealed. The air purifier has multiple chances to filter air that has bypassed the filter the first time.
I recognize the meter used in that article, looks like a Dylos DC1100 Pro or similar. I own one, they're a bit better than the worst consumer ones, but not of the caliber I would expect for an article doing investigative research. You could certainly get a sense of "better/worse" but I'd be skeptical of any quantitative readings (I've seen mine be off by an order of magnitude or more)
Whatever you think of the wirecutter’s picks and impartiality or lack thereof, I find the parts where they explain what matters in any given product category and how they picked helpful in educating myself.
I see they recently updated this particular one in light of the virus (I read this article a few years ago and there were no coronavirus concerns then)
definitely, it's making a difference to our health.
I'd want to see citations showing that (absent serious allergies) there's any health benefit to "purified" air.
Not only do I have trouble seeing normal ambient air (like with my windows open) as a problem, but there is some reason to think that "impurities" may be beneficial, to a degree. For example, there are some studies showing that peanut allergies may be caused by failure to expose kids to allergens early-on. And others showing that giving your immune system something constructive to do can (a) help keep it strong (this evidence is probably weaker); and (b) help with some auto-immune disorders.
I don't have a serious allergy I know of, but I'm sleeping better, and I'm sure that at least some of the dirt I remove from the purifier regularly would be floating in the air.
I don't say you're wrong, and I don't have anything against being out in the open, but not everyone lives in the middle of nowhere with good air quality (besides things such as allergies, dog fur all around, etc.).
Yes, it is recirculated. The question is - does it happens with air speed 100-200 m/s like in wind tunnel so that any particles are evacuated directly from a passenger to the vent? Or maybe it happens extremely slowly and each cough spreads just like in a room, several meters around coughing person and persists for multiple minutes before being drawn to the vent? The answer is obvious.
They either idle the engines / run the APU to keep air circulating the whole time, or else they pipe in fresh air. I think it's SeaTac airport where they paint a message about "Mister Pipe" or "Mister Air Pipe" right on the jetway air pipe, along with a message about how it reduces pollution by reducing engine / APU idling, ending with "Thank You, Mister [Air?] Pipe". This "pipe" allows the more efficient (and bulky / heavy) air filtration and industrial chillers in the airport to be used to supply fresh air to the plane while the jetway is extended.
If this weren't the case, the plane would get very stuffy very quickly. Imagine your share of the cabin space. Now imagine yourself sealed in a cardboard box that size waiting for the plane to board. How many minutes before your cardboard box becomes unbearable? They're always pumping in fresh air while passengers are in the airplane.
There's been a surprising lack of transmissions events on airplanes so far. We've even had a case of an airline steward who was a super-spreader at a party he went to but when they checked the passengers on the plane he arrived with didn't seem to have infected any of them, though he did infect other crew. From the article it seems wearing PPE when interacting with passengers was SOP so probably that's it.
So it does seem that SARS-CoV-2 is really pretty droplet based and you'd not the virus doesn't say in the air long enough to circulate through the ventilation system meaningfully. You seem to mostly be in danger if someone in your row or the rows in front of or behind you talk or cough without wearing a mask.
Well, in the US but South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam,Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand as examples are doing a pretty good job with tracing and isolating to keep the virus contained without much lockdown. And I'm probably unfairly slighting some countries by leaving them off that list but those are the ones that come to mind as generally figuring out who has the virus and how they got it. In places like the US and Europe, of course, who knows how any given person passed it on.
In mid-march Vietnam began quarantining all travelers, and it was common for flights to have infected individuals. Not that many tested positive on tests while they were in quarantine, but it did happen.
The lack of data can be interpreted into actual data. For example let's say we have no data about an increase of deaths at Las Vegas hospitals. That lack of data combined with the fact that Las Vegas has a free press gives us a data point that Vegas does not have NYC levels of mortality.
There's actually a remarkable lack of evidence for people getting it by touching surfaces too. That doesn't mean it literally never happens but it seems to be a small fraction of cases compared to the flu.
Yes, in that particular case the breeze form the air conditioner was blowing virus-laden droplets from one table to an immediately adjacent table. It wasn't a case of the virus going through the air conditioner and that study in particular tends to be frequently cited as evidence the virus doesn't travel very far.
The recirculated air is filtered, so viruses and bacteria are not really a problem. What recirculation brings is better airflow and humidity.
On a plane, the outside air is incredibly cold and dry. The cold is not a problem: air is heated by the engines before it enters the cabin. Humidifying the air would be a problem however as it would require heavy humidifiers and water tanks.
The idea that 100% of the air is recirculated is obviously wrong, we would all die of hypoxia it it was.
Hmm, maybe this is stupid but I wonder if another advantage of wearing a mask is that it creates a kind of humid “microclimate” around your sinuses — combined with plenty of fluids, maybe a healthier scenario overall?
Those don't matter for the ventilation, they are just additional small nozzles to the main one hidden behind the panels. Shutting them or not doesn't affect the quantity of air delivered to the zone.
So you can basically get the virus shoved up your nose way faster and harder than we previously thought then? Especially if you're sitting towards the back of the plane?
No. There's clearly duct work between the pressure bleed valves and the cabin air. Enough volume of air to keep 300 people breathing fine without feeling incredibly stuffy would be a pretty fast wind at the rear galley of a large jetliner.
Air comes in ducts, air goes out ducts. You get fresh air. Both the fresh fraction and the recycled fraction are HEPA filtered.
Edit: another comment here says the mean replacement time for air in an airliner is 4 to 5 minutes with a recirculating ratio of about 50%. I'm not sure if that's right, but it feels about right. Imagine your share of the space in the cabin. Think how long you could sit in a sealed cardboard box that size before the CO2 levels started making it feel stuffy. The airliners aren't carrying around hundreds or thousands of kg of lithium hydroxide to scrub the CO2. They're just dumping stale air overboard.
That shouldn't actually matter. As far as we know, coronavirus is not airborne. From the WHO:
> According to the currently available evidence, transmission through smaller droplet nuclei (airborne transmission) that propagate through air at distances longer than 1 meter is limited to aerosol generating procedures during clinical care of COVID-19 patients.
> as the droplets are too heavy to be airborne, they land on objects and surfaces surrounding the person.
I am willing to be pursuaded, but the quote you have given us contains the caveat "at distances longer than 1 meter", while, in the scenario being discussed here, distances of less than one meter are relevant.
The quote also presents its case as 'absence of evidence' rather than 'evidence of absence'. In the early (and not-so-early) pronouncements about HIV/AIDS, there were a number of significantly harmful false claims (notably, about it not being transmissible heterosexually) being made by health organizations as a result of confusing the former for the latter.
Also, let's take a look at the text surrounding these quotes [my emphasis]:
"In all other contexts [i.e. other than the experimental setup being discussed], available evidence indicates that COVID-19 virus is transmitted during close contact through respiratory droplets (such as coughing) and by fomites.
...
"As such, WHO continues to recommend that everyone performs hand hygiene frequently, follows respiratory
etiquette recommendations and regularly clean and disinfect surfaces. WHO also continues to recommend the
importance of maintaining physical distances and avoiding people with fever or respiratory symptoms. These
preventive measures will limit viral transmission."
The quotes have been taken from a passage discussing the significance of a specific experiment.
The WHO is no longer a trustworthy source. But this is still (mostly) correct, and it's not that hard to dive into the studies directly instead of appealing to authorities. All indications are that it is possible for SARS-Cov-2 to be airborne but it is rare.
The WHO is the same organisation that has been telling people that face masks are not useful [1], repeating claims like no H2H transmission while ignoring warnings from Taiwan, discouraging travel restrictions and bans as late as Feb 29th citing trade and economic impacts (!!!) [2], and even fearmongering tweets like people can be infected with COVID19 twice (that they shortly retracted) [3]; so it's really hard to take this body as credible.
The fact that the WHO is sometimes wrong does not mean that they are always wrong. It also does not mean that any WHO-sourced fact should immediately spawn this reply. In general, the WHO gets more right than they get wrong.
I’m critical of the WHO too but I don’t think it’s productive to make this kind of left turn in this kind of thread.
Do you have any data that suggests the specific WHO-sourced claim in this thread and on this topic is not accurate?
Otherwise it’s just ad hominem, which is noise.
Let’s put it another way: There is no currently available evidence of airborne spread of ncov. That’s a fact regardless of whether the WHO says it or not.
Please remember to keep in mind that the data and the messenger are separate.
Absolutely. While this article does not come from a well known outlet, all of the evidence presented comes from peer-reviewed studies, universities, and organisations like the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health:
> The frustration lies with the fact that WHO is clinging to a 90-year-old medical dogma. The droplet dogma, articulated by William Wells in 1930 for tuberculosis, holds that contagion is largely limited to the distance covered by droplets that are larger than five to 10 microns in size.
> Several types of studies now challenge that view.
> A 2003 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documented a flight in which one SARS case led to 16 possible infections – eight of whom were sitting within three rows of the symptomatic patient. Another study the same year suggested SARS transmission through an air shaft in a housing complex in Hong Kong.
As an anecdotal evidence, I'd like to point to the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Infections continued to grow on the lockdowned cruise ship, where meals were individually delivered and people weren't allowed out of their rooms except for brief exercise with no contact.
How could so many people have been infected if COVID19 is not airbourne? Air recirculation is a prime suspect.
My view is that it is not reasonable to adopt a position that COVID19 is not airborne; and the position taken by the WHO should be discounted (not that we should always take the opposite of WHO; but that should NOT be the end of it given all the failures they have had to date).
'if X is true then I expect to see evidence of X' is generally a reasonable assumption/prior. So not seeing evidence of X is evidence that X is false. It's not proof, but absence of evidence generally is evidence of absence, unless you have a specific reason to believe it's not.
The specific reason is the asymmetry in being wrong in one direction vs the other. If we thought a virus does not spread in a certain way and we are wrong, we may die. If we thought the virus does spread in a certain way and we are wrong, we may unnecessarily wear a mask.
So basically they said the same thing as the CDC and the NHS? This seems to be something I hear a lot of in the anglosphere, ignoring that the WHO is arguably why things aren't way worse, especially in countries that don't have particularly robust epidemiological systems.
This is a completely new virus that just crossed over from animals at the end of last year, and best practices evolved as everyone learned more, and recommendations evolved based on what they felt they could convince people to do at any specific point in time.
Airplane air is less recirculated than you think. The basic mechanism for pressurizing an airplane involves basically running a scoop at the front of the plane and a valve at the back, with the difference between the two controlling the pressure. This means new air is continuously entering the front of the plane and being exhausted out the back.
Compressed air is bled from the engine compressors (or 2 electric compressors in the case of the 787), cooled down using ram air, and passed into an air cycle machine that uses ram air to get the desired pressure and a slightly low temperature. Then it's mixed with filtered recirculated air (taken below the floor around the center of the cabin). Then it's distributed by zone into the whole cabin, brought up to the desired temperature by injecting hot air from the beginning of the cycle, and delivered by nozzles all along the cabin. And excess cabin air is bled out of the cabin, which maintains the right pressure.
However in the case of the virus, the biggest risk arguably doesn't come from the recirculation but the nearby passengers.
That was my understanding as well. Bleed air from the engine is fed into the cabin to maintain altitude pressure, but it’s constantly leaking out of the aircraft too.
There is no risk avoidance in this scenario, just risk reduction. Our ability to do non-bias, rational, effective risk assessment is very poor. Hence, this and many other marketing tools work all the time.
Air is completely renewed in airliner cabins... but this brings up a more important question of whether any of this lockdown / social distancing even works.
I'm 99% sure it's completely ineffective. We breathe the same air, touch the same services, and overall interact way too much for any of this to really work against something that's supposed to be so contagious.
> but this brings up a more important question of whether any of this lockdown / social distancing even works.
> I'm 99% sure it's completely ineffective. We breathe the same air, touch the same services, and overall interact way too much for any of this to really work against something that's supposed to be so contagious.
This makes no sense. Lockdown/distancing is about reducing how much we're "breathing the same air, touching the same surfaces"
I've managed to avoid touching the same surfaces as a non-household member for 5 weeks or so and I'm pretty sure none of the air I've breathed has come from anywhere within 2m of anyone else.
And even if it had it's all about probabilities. I've massively reduced the chance of contagion. I'm just rolling those dice a lot less often.
People are still going to work and coming back to their communities, including healthcare workers who are highly exposed. People are still going shopping, touching the same products while bringing them home. People are still getting deliveries of food and packages that have passed countless hands and surfaces. People are still walking around neighborhoods, touching gates, benches, doors, signs, tables, cars, mailboxes, etc.
While I don't doubt your efforts, I do doubt how effective they are. I'm not sure why such a question is so controversial. People are messy, and we vastly underestimate our interactions with the world.
Norway has used lockdown and social distancing as the primary tool to fight COVID-19. On March the 12th we entered lockdown[1].
You can see the results on this page[2], where we clearly peaked at the end of March.
In the capital, certain groups are disproportionally infected by the virus[3]. In particular immigrants which does not understand Norwegian very well and come from cultures where visiting people, especially sick ones, is socially important.
These people are far less likely to have read about and understood the importance of social distancing, as information in their native language was lacking in the early stages[4].
> In the capital, certain groups are disproportionally infected by the virus[3]. In particular immigrants which does not understand Norwegian very well and come from cultures where visiting people, especially sick ones, is socially important.
It's pretty disingenuous to say this when the link only lists one group that they felt the need to make specific outreach to. Your link states that in general they are not seeing over-representation from people born outside of Norway.
Norway has also tested less than 3.7% of it's residents - we know they've done less than 200k tests, and we don't know how many people have been tested more than once, so it may be significantly less, so we really don't know how many people have had the virus or still have it.
> We breathe the same air, touch the same services, and overall interact way too much
That is not a lockdown.
I haven't left my house for two weeks apart from a few small excursions where I stayed at least two meters away from everyone, while wearing a cloth mask. That is a lockdown.
The phrases "lockdown" and "quarantine" are being abused, though not as badly as the horribly misused term "shelter in place". But I think we all realize that in the common vernacular of the last few months, these terms all mean you stay home most of the time, except for essential trips and jobs. They do not automatically imply never leaving the house since the vast, vast majority of people do leave their homes periodically, except for the most severe lockdowns in a select few locations. Not coming within two meters of someone outside of your household for two weeks straight is an exception, not the norm. Most people at least go to the store, but by all current definitions those people are still adhering to "lockdowns" or whatever you want to call them.
It works (in general, not sure about an airliner) because the virus does not travel in air. It travels only in small droplets of liquid, which can travel in air, but only for short distances. On long distances those droplets just fall to the ground/surfaces.
There are still precautions to take especially when touching surfaces, because the fallen droplets can then transfer onto the skin, and then later into the lungs when we touch our mouth, nose or eyes. But social distancing absolutely works in order to prevent the primary transfer of droplets from face to face through the air.
The lockdown measures can be shown to have very clear effects merely by looking at the data. I've tracked data directly from John's Hopkins & state dept of health websites, and just off the top of my head without looking at the spreadsheet can say that the growth rate massively (tho insufficiently) is reduced by the lockdown.
Without lockdown, the daily increases in cases & deaths showed a doubling rate of every 3-4 days, sometimes faster. This is also what was reported in Italy earlier in the crisis.
Now, the doubling days in the locked down areas consistently exceeds 25 dsys.
This is not subtle, it is blatantly empirically obvious in the data. No need for theorizing.
I mention that the lockdown may be insufficient, or insufficiently implemented because the growth factor is still on a plateau generally exceeding 1.0,which means that we still have a net spreading, or positive growth rate, i.e., it is not yet being extinguished, only slowed.
So we will need to do more. From looking at other results, that will involve ubiquitous masks, glasses, gloves ang overwhelming program of testing, tracking, & targeted isolation.
Meanwhile, another MIT study (iirc) showed the effects of minor lockdown violations. With full isolation the societal exposure is limited to the essentworkets and their families, about 26% of the population. But if only one household member goes visiting others, the societal exposure increases to 90%++. Just a little casual 'it's no big deal' attitude screws up the whole thing.
My point is that the US never approached anywhere near the level of isolated lockdown/quarantine of China, and the protections get weaker by the day as people get tired, lazy, and complacent. It seems like the virus has already spread greatly, as confirmed by new rounds of testing showing far more infections while the death rate is stabilizing.
Agree that the US is doing a half-baked lockdown (being generous), inconsistently, and is opening up far too soon.
However, looking at the data, the death rate is only increasing; recent weekly series starting 06-April is: 3.0%, 4.1%, 5.4%, 5.7%, to 5.8% yesterday. This is actually low, since today's case count is the wrong denominator, as it has a certain amount of deaths built-in but not counted and this is still in a growth phase. Using [deaths]/[cases_on_day_-7] produces the most consistent numbers for a death rate of about 7.1%.
Neither the changes in contagion rate nor death rate, even with the half-baked lockdowns, even approximate support for your contention that lockdowns do not work.
They in fact support the opposite conclusion, even half-baked measures reduce the spread, and better measures would be better. The best are proper full testing coverage, tracking, and targeted isolation, as implemented well by South Korea.
As to your contention about the contagiousness, it is known that it is not nearly contagious as, say Measles, but is more contagious than Flu.
Alaska airlines has already taken measures of blocking off middle seats and aisles on smaller planes. If you try and purchase a seat right now, the airline tells you:
- All middle seats on large aircraft are blocked for purchase through 5/31/20.
- All aisle seats on small aircraft are blocked for purchase through 5/31/20.
I do wonder if this will continue base the end of may though.
From the email sent to Alaska milage plan members: "If you’re a family or large group who wants to sit together, feel free to make the request with reservations or at the airport."
... so, if you talk to a person when you check in they should be able to sort it out for you.
People moving to help families. People moving for new jobs. People moving for work. People do still need to move, even during a pandemic. Supply chains do need to keep working at some capacity, otherwise society will actually collapse.
Edit: I should specify that I am indeed pro-lockdown, just wanted to point out that in order to continue our comfortable, convenient lifestyle the cogs need to keep turning.
120,000 out of 325,000,000 does not sound high at all, to be honest. Normal would be something like 25x that.
Examples I know of personally:
My step-mother is flying out to be with her 102 year old father in a couple weeks. My sister-in-law is flying out about the same time to be with her own father. Neither is in a position to wait many months.
I was going to say that 3 million people per day sounds way too high, but that's only 3 flights per person per year to reach that rate. Now I know not everyone flies, but I personally do ~20 flights/year, a bunch of people I know that don't fly often do around 10.
Yeah it really adds up fast. I don't have a good source handy, but I recall reading once that at any given moment, perhaps a million people are in the air. That sounds nuts at first, but then again, the planet has billions of people.
20x per year does sound kinda nuts, though :). I imagine you get all the mileage perks. And hopefully upgrades!
Ah, no upgrades yet, but in a few years it should start paying (not literal) dividends.
A usual international round trip may be 4 flights, so if you visit home 2x/year then that's already 8 flights. Add in a conference per year for another 3 flights, and maybe a few domestic flights for vacation or travel and that's how you end up in that range.
Ah yeah, that makes sense. I didn't even think about the fact that I take six flights every time I fly to India & back. I was thinking 20 separate trips per year when I read your comment.
Completely on topic. Who is paying $39 for wider spaced seats when through most parts of the world, nobody is flying anywhere at all? Seems like a hail mary on the part of the airline if you ask me.
Given that the plane has the space, and it's good publicity. Seems like it's at best really good and at worse mainly a harmless marketing stunt, but one that will be temporary. I hope we will see more companies doing similar pro-social stunts
I hope there will be much less air traffic, not just because of covid and contamination risks, but mostly for the environment. It's such a difference when you live near a airport, or even remotely close
To expand on your point: it is taboo to trade off sacred values for money [1]. For things like health, we are forced to pretend that they have infinite value.
> As usual, if you want to be healthy, you pay extra.
It's been like that for centuries. Healthier food costs more than unhealthy food. That's why poor people have a lower life expectancy than their rich counterparts.
You seriously think all people are equal and/or should be treated equally and/or should have equal outcomes? Ha.
I don't get this. The cost of a stir fry with rice or a pasta with fresh sauce is going to be less or close to any processed meal and the preparation time is of the order of 15m or less.
Are fresh vegetables insanely expensive where you're from?
Freshly prepared food is more expensive for all sorts of reasons than shelf-stable, highly-processed junk food. To buy fresh vegetables, you need to be able to shop frequently. To prepare fresh food, you need the time and energy to cook plus the skills and equipment plus a kitchen.
Low cost airlines like frontier usually need at-least 85% occupancy to remain profitable. I don't see any good alternative. But with the WHO recommendation of maintaining 2 meters social distancing, it's unclear if this is even helpful.
I keep hearing this, but 85% occupancy isn't some magic number. If occupancy is 66% instead, they can put their prices up 30% and realise the same revenue. Prices fluctuate way more than that anyway and oil prices (the biggest marginal cost) are at an all time low.
Airlines are in trouble because they can't run as many flights and they have significant fixed costs: leasing planes, servicing debt, payroll costs. Not because the flights they do run will be less full.
The WHO used to recommend 1 meter and in Australia it's still 1.5 meters. These are just guidelines. In the end, a little distance reduces the chance of transmission and more distance reduces it more. Droplet transmission can occur at much larger distances than 2 meters, it just becomes exceedingly unlikely, much like it becomes more unlikely at 2 meters versus 1 meter.
The whole article is about how the option exists. My point is that it should not be an option! You should not be allowed to sit next to a stranger and potentially infect them with COVID
Airlines have been sitting people next to strangers who could be infected with anything for more than 50 years. Life is not without a certain amount of risk.
You can’t buy an empty seat. For instance, if you want to buy the middle seat to ensure it is empty, they won’t let you. At least they wouldn’t prior to this year.
I'm skeptical that the total amount charged would be the same if it were mandatory. I mean, consider backup cameras on cars. Do they cost the same after being required as when they were luxury options?
That is, doesn't price discrimination generally allow companies to extract more money overall? And in this case it's contrary to public welfare.
We're not talking about reducing the marginal price on new technology that needed capital investment- we're artificially reducing overall capacity. Airfare already had seating efficiency priced in.
For the math to work, best case, you'd need to reduce capacity of a 737 (3+3 across) by 1/3 (no middle seats). 1/2 for sets of 2 or 4 seats.
They don't seem to have mentioned the obvious fact that the middle seat is usually taken by someone who is a companion (and frequently, a housemate) of either the window or aisle person.
I think what they really mean is "no two people from different households may sit next to each other". Seems dumb to not sell the middle seat to a family of three for instance.
The person on the other side gets the benefit of that. The airline still got $39 out of it. A more interesting scenario is what happens if both of those people paid: can the airline sell the same empty seat twice? I'm assuming it's fine because they're not selling an empty seat, they're selling seating on a seat that has an unoccupied adjacent seat.
One of the good things about masks-in-public being a cultural thing is that you might not look like a weirdo wearing a mask on a plane in the future, regardless of whether a pandemic is in progress.
I am hoping this normalizes mask wearing in public in general in the future.
I would love to default to face mask and sunglasses in most “no expectation of privacy” places. Almost all high end/national retail uses some sort of facial recognition systems now.
We don't know if people that are contract covid obtain ANY immunity much less long lasting immunity. We rejected that strategy because even if it actually worked it would have cost 2 million lives in the US. After we burned 2 million corpses we might be dealing with a different strain that the rest of us aren't immune to and find ourselves back at square one.
Contemplating hugging strangers in hopes of spreading covid is contemplating negligent homicide.
When stuff like the GP gets posted, I think it's important to point out that even with social isolation, NYC's hospitals were overrun, doctors got PTSD, and almost certainly non-COVID-19 patients died due to reduced resources.
Also, we need to consider morbidity. There's evidence of permanent lung damage in some COVID-19 survivors, and perhaps other long-term disabilities.
Did you ever stop to think that everyone else isn't stupid and we have rejected that strategy for a reason?
It was concluded that letting it "wash over us" would cost 2 million lives in the US and might not result in any sort of herd immunity. Why would we kill millions "if there is even a chance" of acquiring herd immunity. Why wouldn't we find out first?
How about instead we work to minimize deaths while we work on effective treatments and in the future vaccinations. Imagine that letting it run free and infecting 60% of the population over months and killing 1% and losing 2 million or 1 million if the true IFR is 0.5%.
Imagine keeping the infection down to 10% until we find effective therapies that reduce death rate to 1/10 of 1% and losing only 300k-400k instead of 1-2 million.
Imagine we ship an effective vaccine next year and instead keep our total fatalities to 200k instead.
I don't want to sacrifice 600k-1.2M additional people's lives to your desire to just get it over with.
2 million is only less than 1 percent of the population. We'll barely notice it and within that number, some will be dead anyway regardless of the pandemic.
I have bad asthma and my wife's immune system is compromised by virtue of years of Rheumatoid arthritis drugs. Both of us are at substantial risk of dying of covid if we get it and yet neither of us is too infirm to do something if our nation decides that the best thing to do is to kill us to move forward.
Most of the population has some connection to people that are vulnerable to covid. We give a damn and we aren't alone.
But there will be no hospitals left after for you to use.
Also I suspect behavioral science says that bad stuff happens when 1% of people are dead in a couple of months, beyond just no health providers left. e.g. involving flaming torches and pitchforks.
>But there will be no hospitals left after for you to use
First of all, I may or may not need hospital. Besides we are currently underutilized the hospital, lots of nurse and doctor are furlough because not enough patient. Even in the case of not enough hospital, new hospital can be built. China build a makeshift hospital in matter of days.
There are already million of people dead in the us every year, before pandemic and people barely notice it.
Also, I’m sure there are lots of clinical trials for vaccines. That could be another option for you.
What sounds appealing?
You could get a list of essential jobs and see what you’re qualified for. As a random example, I think bin men are staying home because they’re afraid of getting sick and infecting their families? Looks like there are openings: https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+bin+worker+jobs
You could run it when the plane was empty, but if you're going to do that, you might as well just put the lights on a cart and push it through the plane.
I don't think the main concern is virus particles left over from previous flights. It's the person sitting within 3-5 rows of you for 2 hours during your own flight.
It should be law that airlines cannot seat people so closely, at least until Covid passes.
If they need to double or triple the airfare, so be it. I don't think increasing the price will alter demand that much, I don't see how people will rush back to travel unless it is absolutely necessary - thus price sensitivity will be fairly inelastic as a result.
even better if they use some of the preliminary infection flow in small spaces research[0] to design a seating arrangement to minimize transmission, figure out which air vents should be open, etc.
you can be seated 60cm to the right of someone and not be infected, but 6 meters behind or infront and get infected
Dude. That's literally what airplanes do. I don't know where people got the idea that the air in a cabin is "recycled". The air in an airplane will fully cycle with fresh new air every 4 or 5 minutes to remove carbon dioxide build-up.
The air you breathe on an airplane is the air that is compressed by the engines or the auxiliary power unit, cooled down by the A/C, and diverted to the cabin after passing through a HEPA filtering system.
People get sick in planes simply because it's a freaking small tube with hundreds of people sharing the space for several hours. It wouldn't be different than putting the same amount of people on a ground facility with the same dimensions and good ventilation.
"Research has shown that there is very little risk of any communicable disease being transmitted on board an aircraft.
The quality of aircraft cabin air is carefully controlled. Ventilation rates provide a total change of air 20–30 times per hour. Most modern aircraft have recirculation systems, which recycle up to 50% of cabin air. The recirculated air is usually passed through HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters, of the type used in hospital operating theatres and intensive care units, which trap dust particles, bacteria, fungi and viruses."
Some people have allergies or chronic coughs. They should implement temperature checks at the very least, or better yet, mandatory testing for the virus like Emirates is doing for all of their flights.
Asymtomatics exists, and in the early stages of the disease you may have mild or no symtomps yet, even if you develop them later. So you may be a carrier but their test won't spot you.
You should wear a mask at the very least, even if you feel healthy or not in a risk group, mostly because it will protect the people around from you.
There's been a lot of speculation and conflicting information, but I recently read that a supposedly random sample of people in NY (I assume state, not city) supermarkets found about 16% had antibodies for covid.
So it's my belief currently that the reported case numbers are on the order of 1/10th the total and one in six people probably has it.
Edit: is this controversial? Do people not believe NY state did such a study? WTF??
“ In New York City, about 21 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey. The rate was about 17 percent on Long Island, nearly 12 percent in Westchester and Rockland Counties and less than 4 percent in the rest of the state.
“State researchers sampled blood from the approximately 3,000 people they had tested over two days, including about 1,300 in New York City, at grocery and big-box stores. The results were sent to the state’s Wadsworth facility in Albany, a respected public health lab.
This was characterized as Covid spreading “far more widely” than previously believed in NY. So I agree national rate probably higher than people think. Of course the 1/5 figure would not be expected outside the hotspot of NYC. Probably a national high in fact. But 1/10 as a long term national number seems plausible.
Guessing the downs are because you acknowledged that speculation and conflicting information is problematic, then tossed out specific numbers and attributed "they say". Should probably cite if you want to malign a lack of citations.
> The new product complements a face-covering mandate Frontier is imposing for passengers starting Friday to help guard against the spread of the new coronavirus
The article indicates that they have you(r mouth) covered.
I know they will screen for symptoms but this has to be "health theatre"