The use of 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 the group had been infected. a short study published Tuesday in the US medical journal. JAMA network open, virologists at a university hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, meticulously contacted all passengers on the flight, none of whom had worn masks at the time, to examine the real risk posed by the presence of travelers infected with COVID-19. On March 9, 102 passengers boarded the Tel Aviv-Frankfurt flight that lasted four hours and 40 minutes, including a group of 24 tourists. German authorities were alerted that the group had contacted the manager of an infected hotel in Israel, and decided to test the 24 tourists upon arrival in Frankfurt. Seven of them tested positive, as did seven others later. Four to five weeks later, the researchers contacted the other 78 passengers on the flight, the 90 percent of whom responded. The researchers asked them who they came into contact with and what symptoms they had, and they tested several of them. They found that two passengers were most likely infected during the flight: the two people sitting across the aisle from the original seven cases. .Airlines are trying to convince a scared public that measures like mandatory face masks and hospital-grade air filters make sitting on an airplane safer than many other indoor environments during the coronavirus pandemic, but it is not working. . AP For respiratory viruses, experts traditionally consider that the contagion zone on an airplane extends two rows of seats in front of the infected person and two rows behind, but surprisingly, a person sitting in the row (seat 44K) directly in front of two of the infected tourists (seats 45J and 45H) were not infected. “This person in row 44 told us that he had a long conversation and was talking a long time with the two in row 45,” Sandra Ciesek told AFP, director of the Institute of Medical Virology in Frankfurt, and noted that that did it all. More surprising was that it 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, from the same institute in Frankfurt. All the other passengers were not evaluated, so the researchers could not exclude that some of them could have been infected. The study highlights that, in any case, viral transmission on an airplane is possible if passengers do not wear masks. But, Hoehl noted, “as the rate was lower than we expected, and as none of the passengers wore masks, I think it’s reassuring that we couldn’t detect any more “cases. The researchers also said that several studies on repatriation flights from Wuhan, China, at the beginning of the pandemic, found that no transmissions occurred on board while passengers were masked.”
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