Covid-19 Risk Among Airline Passengers: Should the Middle Seat Stay Empty?
Barnett, A.; Fleming, K.
Show abstract
We use recent data and research results to approximate the probability that an air traveler in coach will contract Covid-19 on a US domestic flight two hours long, both when all coach seats are full and when all but middle seats are full. The point estimates we reach based on data from late June 2020 are 1 in 4,300 for full flights and 1 in 7,700 when middle seats are kept empty. These estimates are subject to both quantifiable and nonquantifiable sources of uncertainty, and sustain known margins of error of a factor about 2.5. However, because uncertainties in key parameters affect both risk estimates the same way, they leave the relative risk ratio for "fill all seats" compared to "middle seat open" close to 1.8 (i.e., close to 1/4,300)/(1/7,700). We estimate the mortality risks caused by Covid-19 infections contracted on airplanes, taking into account that infected passengers can in turn infect others. The point estimates--which use 2019 data about the percentage of seats actually occupied on US flights--range from one death per 400,000 passengers to one death per 600,000. These death-risk levels are considerably higher than those associated with plane crashes but comparable to those arising from two hours of everyday activities during the pandemic.
Matching journals
The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- SARS-CoV-2 infection dynamics in Denmark, February through October 2020: Nature of the past epidemic and how it may develop in the future 96%
- Predicting the effects of COVID-19 related interventions in urban settings by combining activity-based modelling, agent-based simulation, and mobile phone data 96%
- Mathematically modeling worried-well behavior during infectious disease outbreaks 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- Modeling COVID-19 outbreaks in United States with distinct testing, lockdown speed and fatigue rates 96%
- Cost and social distancing dynamics in a mathematical model of COVID-19 with application to Ontario, Canada 96%
- Assessing the impact of widespread respirator use in curtailing COVID-19 transmission in the United States 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- An evaluation of educational institutions safe reopening strategies for in-person classes amid the COVID-19 pandemic 96%
- The effect of the definition of ‘pandemic’ on quantitative assessments of infectious disease outbreak risk 95%
- Theoretical investigation of pre-symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 person-to-person transmission in households 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- A Predictive Modelling Framework for COVID-19 Transmission to Inform the Management of Mass Events 96%
- COVID-19 spreading: a recursive model 93%
- General Model for COVID-19 Spreading with Consideration of Intercity Migration, Insufficient Testing and Active Intervention: Application to Study of Pandemic Progression in Japan and USA 92%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.