11/19/2020
Gotta love all the info that travel industry wizard, Johnny Jet shares with his followers -- get this about face masks on planes...so encouraging, even if they bug the heck outa me!
From infectious disease doctor, David O. Freedman -- "a study looked at all Emirates flights from Dubai to Hong Kong between June 16 and July 5. What he found is quite telling. During those three weeks, Emirates had five flights with seven or more infected passengers on each flight, for a total of 58 coronavirus-positive passengers flying on eight-hour trips. And yet, nobody else on the planes — none of the other 1,500 to 2,000 passengers — picked up the virus, Freedman and his colleague report in the Journal of Travel Medicine.
"Those were flights with higher risk, and yet there was no transmission," Freedman says.
On another Emirates flight, a whopping 27 coronavirus-positive people boarded the plane in Dubai. Guess how many other passengers were infected on the eight-hour flight?
"There appear to have been two in-flight transmissions," Freedman says.
Without the masks, he would have expected many more cases. Freedman and his colleague found several other high-risk flights with no transmission, including an executive jet that flew from Tokyo to Tel Aviv, Israel, with two of the 11 passengers infected with the coronavirus.
"They were all sitting in a very small environment because it was an executive jet," Freedman says. "And yet again, there was no transmission because passengers were meticulously masked. The crew supervised the masking."
