For $39, Frontier Air Will Let Passengers Keep Their Distance
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I know they will screen for symptoms but this has to be "health theatre"
https://www.ptitechnologies.com/news-event/pti-announces-the...
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
2. HEPA filters and various other filter media claim to filter viruses. So I think your recollection is incorrect. See: https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/what-merv-rating-...
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/what-is-the-best-air-pur...
Orders of magnitude more? Are we talking about the same category of products?
What is your source saying HEPA filter doesn't filter viruses? Do you any data to back up your claims?
Regarding UV light, I agree that it might not be too effective... (but I had a great experience with using one on my aquarium a long time ago).
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)
I own a mid-level, optical based counter and even it drifts without regular calibration.
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 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.).
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.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
This couple was infected by the woman they were sitting behind
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/09/british-couple...
And this is in contrast to other respiratory illnesses like swine flu where infected passengers have caused many other infections on a plane.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3810906/
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.
There's an unsurprising lack of data on transmission events.
https://www.kaggle.com/nhntran/vietnam-covid19-patient-datas...
Dataset collector's writeup: https://towardsdatascience.com/covid-19-what-do-we-know-abou...
Our best guess is that it's just the people immediately next to you ( plus any surface you touch)... but we don't have high confidence in that.
https://today.rtl.lu/news/science-and-environment/a/1498185....
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article
visual of transmission through air conditioning:
The plane is pressurized from the engines, and the cabin air is entirely replaced with new, fresh, outside pressurized air every few minutes.
There’s a bleed valve in the tail area where it blows out.
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.
Why do they do that? I leave mine of full blast the whole flight to stay cool.
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.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
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 main study from Wuhan that people cite for airborne SARS-Cov-2 only found high levels of airborne SARS-Cov-2 in poorly ventilated areas of a hospital setting (where certain medical procedures like intubation are known to generate aerosols): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2271-3. Well-ventilated areas had very low levels. A separate study in Singapore found no airborne samples in a hospital setting (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762692). Documented spreading events are consistent with the disease not being aerosolized (one example: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1251556084424347649).
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/not-wearing-masks-pr...
[2]: https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
[3]: https://reason.com/2020/04/26/world-health-organization-twee...
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.
> 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.
https://australiascience.tv/is-covid-19-airborne-dont-know-b...
Another scientific article directly on the airbourneness of COVID19: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
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).
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.
Oh, and you may find this educational. It's about a pandemic preparedness exercise in october of last year https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2019/12/12/how-prepar...
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: I'm reminded of the mythbusters episode about virus spread which shows just how messy we are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbQ9Kl9CqUU
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].
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/na-stenger-norge-1.14941623
[2]: https://www.nrk.no/korona/status/
[3]: https://www.fhi.no/nyheter/2020/status-koronasmitte-onsdag-1...
[4]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/smittevernoverlege-i-oslo_-_-meir-n...
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.
Was a bit hasty with my attribution. See my [4] for more relevant quotes.
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.
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.
How do you explain the reduction in cases and deaths in Italy, Spain, France, NY?
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.
Stay well out there, folks.
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.
- 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.
... so, if you talk to a person when you check in they should be able to sort it out for you.
I read last week that 120,000 people a day are flying out of U.S. airports. I found that number surprisingly high.
The only people I could think of who need to fly at this time are couriers transporting organs for transplant.
Who else is flying?
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.
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.
20x per year does sound kinda nuts, though :). I imagine you get all the mileage perks. And hopefully upgrades!
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.
Housing near airports have environmental and noise issues factored into the price
by the way, it's a global pollution issue
—Yzma[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tab...
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?
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.
Additionally, I don't think you understand how airlines buy gas. This will help: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-The-Oil-Price...
This was vanishingly unlikely, especially on a US airline, and both are substantially more difficult to catch.
https://viewfromthewing.com/who-knew-you-can-buy-an-empty-mi...
And I think it's pretty reasonable to be optional, since I wouldn't be worried about sitting next to a family member, for example.
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.
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.
Let's play devil's advocate here though.
What happens in the situation where you've paid for the middle seat to be empty but the person the other side hasn't?
These are the things that let you know the kind of company you are dealing with.
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.
Not necessarily for use when someone's in the seat, but also to blast in-between flights before the next batch comes on.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photokeratitis
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.
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.
you can be seated 60cm to the right of someone and not be infected, but 6 meters behind or infront and get infected
It’s 2020 we should use more technology.
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.
https://www.who.int/ith/mode_of_travel/tcd_aircraft/en/
"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."
Every single intercontinental flight I have been on there were always at least three people hacking their lungs out.
And, yeah, I got sick almost a week to the day every single time.
If you have a cough or a fever, you apparently just don't get to board the plane.
Us consumers should have demanded this a long time ago!
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.
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??
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-anti...
“ 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.
The article indicates that they have you(r mouth) covered.