Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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 been a surprising lack of transmissions events on airplanes so far.

There's an unsurprising lack of data on transmission events.

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.

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.

I think you might want to think about how noticeable deaths are versus contagion of a disease where it's likely you don't show outward symptoms.

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.

https://www.kaggle.com/nhntran/vietnam-covid19-patient-datas...

Dataset collector's writeup: https://towardsdatascience.com/covid-19-what-do-we-know-abou...

While you cite news reports of anecdotes, the truth is we have very little data one way or the other.

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.

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.

https://today.rtl.lu/news/science-and-environment/a/1498185....

The CDC has released an article titled "COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with Air Conditioning in Restaurant, Guangzhou, China, 2020"

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article

visual of transmission through air conditioning:

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764-f1

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.

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