“ Reassuring ” study on the risk of virus transmission by plane – Raw Story

Wearing masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus was not widespread in March, when a group of German tourists took a long flight home from Israel – but researchers were surprised to find that only two passengers outside of the group had been infected.

In a short study published Tuesday in the American medical journal JAMA Network Open, virologists at a university hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, meticulously contacted all the passengers on the flight – none of whom had worn a mask at the time – to examine the actual risk posed. by the presence of travelers infected with COVID-19.

On March 9, 102 passengers boarded the Tel Aviv-Frankfurt flight which lasted four hours and 40 minutes, including a group of 24 tourists.

German authorities were alerted that the group had come into contact with an infected hotel manager in Israel and decided to test the 24 tourists upon their arrival in Frankfurt.

Seven of them tested positive, as well as seven more later.

Four to five weeks later, researchers contacted the other 78 passengers on the flight, 90% of whom responded. The researchers asked them who they had come into contact with and what symptoms they had, and tested several of them.

They discovered that two passengers were most likely infected during the flight: the two people sitting across the aisle from the original seven cases.

For respiratory viruses, experts traditionally consider the contagion zone on an airplane to extend two rows of seats in front of the infected person and two rows behind.

But shockingly, a person sitting in the row (seat 44K) right in front of two of the infected tourists (seats 45J and 45H) was not infected.

“This person in row 44 told us that he had a long conversation and that he was talking for a long time with the two in row 45,” Sandra Ciesek, head of the Institute of Medical Virology, told AFP. from Frankfurt, stressing that that was it. most surprisingly, he was not infected.

The two passengers sitting directly behind another infected tourist also did not contract COVID-19.

“We were surprised to find only two probable transmissions,” said Sebastian Hoehl, of the same institute in Frankfurt.

All the other passengers were not tested, so the researchers could not rule out that some of them could have been infected. The study points out that, in all cases, viral transmission in an airplane is indeed possible if the passengers do not wear a mask.

But, Hoehl noted, “since the rate was lower than we expected, and none of the passengers were wearing masks, I think it’s reassuring that we can’t detect more” cases.

The researchers also said that several studies of repatriation flights from Wuhan, China, at the start of the pandemic, found that no transmission had occurred on board while passengers were masked.

© 2020 AFP