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Proof that airplanes are a Covid hot mess right now - and a personal fix [1]

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Date: 2024-07-24  

I’m writing this post on location in a plane during the July 2024 Covid wave across America. You might think I’d be safe up here in the clouds, but the opposite is true. Although I might end up getting sick from the terrestrial exposures I’ve had all week during vacation (which were totally worth it), I’m not feeling like getting sick on this plane with coughing strangers who can’t help but fill the plane with aerosols.

Quick reasoning. Covid can still be a serious illness, especially when we consider the potential for long Covid and cumulative damage from repeat infection after infection. Getting sick with anything gratuitously doesn’t seem fun. Ventilation and masking are important, proven ways to reduce the risk of viruses landing in our respiratory tracts. At the very least masking reduces the viral dose we might receive, which makes a difference in terms of whether and how severely we get sick. N95s and KN95s are excellent shields. New SARS CoV-2 variants keep proving how evolution hones infectivity and immune evasion to keep spreading.

My friend Dr. Ruth Crystal sums up the current situation by quoting:

According to JP Weiland, currently in the United States, there are 780,000 new infections each day and on a national level 1 in every 43 people is currently infectedwith COVID. However, in the West 1 in every 25 people is infected, in the South 1 in 34 people is infected, 1 in 59 in the Midwest and 1 in 73 infected in the Northeastern U.S. He expects that we will hit the peak of this COVID wave in the next few weeks. Although hospitalizations and deaths are lower than they were in the beginning of the pandemic, many people will continue to get Long COVID and other long term consequences of COVID infections such as increased risks of heart attacks, strokes and increased new onset diabetes.

The most effective way to conceptualize ventilation quality might be to picture someone smoking in your immediate surroundings. Imagine the guy 5 rows ahead smoking a fat stogie. In a plane with terribly high CO2 levels, you are figuratively sharing his cigar. Remember those days of smoke-filled planes and bars?

But the most practical way to estimate the quality of present ventilation might be a carbon dioxide meter. We got one during those darkest days. When CO2 levels exceed 700 parts per million (ppm) most experts agree this is stale air. Fresh outdoor air is around 420 ppm. Recall that >700 in a building is a minimum standard for acceptable air turnover.

{the following ppms are documented with pictures on my Substack, too many to upload onto Daily Kos and keep the page format from breaking down… so click over there to see the craziness for yourself!)

Here’s the airport in Philly, in the tunnel as we are boarding the plane. 1985 is not good, unless it’s the year 1985, and you are Michael Jackson:

1,985 ppm

Here’s the plane waiting for takeoff:

2,161 ppm

Here’s the plane in the air:

1,606 ppm

Recall that anything above 700 is not very good. Cigar smoke.

Time to fly home.

Still no Covid at this point.

Here’s the airport in Denver:

1,040 ppm

Here’s waiting on the plane for takeoff. Absolutely a new Olympic record for bad air in my experience:

2,437 ppm

Here’s the in-flight reading:

1,659 ppm

So despite what they say about planes having good ventilation, the opposite is consistently true in my measured experience. Same for the airport itself, though to a lesser degree. I don’t board a plane without my 3M Aura. Especially during Covid waves like the one were are in right now.

To quote my Covidlandia post from last month:

Airplanes are vectors for ruining your trip with an infection Speaking of airplanes, this study is very convincing. In a systematic review performed by researchers at Stanford and CHOP here in Philly: Researchers analyzed 50 flights from 15 articles published between January 2020 and April 2021. They found that longer flights without masks significantly increased Covid transmission risk. Medium-length flights (3-6 hours) had about 4.7 times more cases than short flights (under 3 hours), while long flights (over 6 hours) had nearly 26 times more cases. Each additional hour of flight time increased the risk by about 1.5 times. Importantly, long flights with enforced masking reported no transmission. Wow.

So, how was my vacation? Great thank you! Saw friends, family, majestic mountains, hiked, and stumbled upon this powerful elk with massive antlers; his glory cannot be captured in a photo. I would like him to be the sigil of my house.

My vacation was also bookended by the attempted assassination of a former president and the Washingtonian sacrifice of power by a current president, who came down with a case of Covid in between. I’m very grateful no one was assassinated, and that the president is reportedly recovering and taking Paxlovid. I would do more than that. I’m grateful that we have Covid treatments, vaccines, and partial immunity gained from previous infections… yet as a primary care doc I’m still concerned about the toll repeated infections are having, especially on older minds. I’m going to have to catch up on a lot of reading so that I can be an informed voter.

What is important to me is to not have government infringe upon the rights of women, insert itself in the most private of family decisions, cut Medicare and Social Security, and turn vaccines and public health tools into political litmus tests. We need to aggressively mitigate climate change, as this affects everything from our health to our children’s ability to live on this planet.

So when I share this stuff about choosing to mask on planes, politically tainted and inconvenient counter-narrative that it is, I’m speaking from a place of genuine concern and with a primary care sense of duty. I know that regardless of these studies and what seems like rational behavior to me, perhaps just 5% of people on planes are choosing to protect themselves.

I’m grateful that we have choices, updated vaccines on the way, boosters for those at higher risk, less severe illnesses on the whole, and antiviral treatments. Safe travels, and may your summer vacations be grand, your summer be a brat summer, and let’s go Harris!

~

I write the substack called Examined. More links to previous posts about ventilation, reducing infection risk, blood clot risk, and radiation risk on planes can be found over there :)

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