Why I Won’t Fly

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Juneteenth

To judge from my hit count, readers have been disappointed in my failure to mark this year’s Juneteenth. In truth, I knew little specific about the holiday until enlightened by Jamelle Bouie’s column in the New York Times today. Measured against the depths of African-Americans’ four centuries of hardship and suffering, Juneteenth may seem a minor holiday. The practical effect of its emancipation was, after all, limited to Texas. But this year Juneteenth takes on great symbolic significance. It comes amidst the worst presidency in our history, a massive neglect of working people for profit, the worst pandemic in a century (with African-Americans its most frequent victims), and an atrocious spate of police murders and brutality that has left all of us, regardless of race, fed up. Perhaps the hardship to which all of us are now subject has made the majority more empathetic toward Africans and their descendants, who’ve been oppressed by design since our Founding. In elucidating the meaning of Juneteenth, Mr. Bouie focuses on African-Americans’ contributions to their own liberation. But their valiant struggle and its achievements should lead none of us to think they should “take it from here.” The economic and social inequality under which many suffer is still far too great for the rest of us to expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. We did that a century and a half ago, when we denied each just-freed slave family forty acres and a mule. And here we are. I hope and trust that the hardships through which we all are now suffering—if not all in equal measure—will bring about a progressive and egalitarian revolution this fall. But no such revolution will be complete without addressing Juneteenth and its broken promises. It’s far from enough for us to reform our police to stop the brutality and wanton murders. That would be a bare minimum. This moment demands that the white and the wealthy attempt the impossible: to atone for and reverse the consequences of four centuries of near-continuous atrocities unjustly directed at a single group among us. We must make reparation. Not the token, one-time, one-size-fits-all grants for the four-year Japanese Internment. This four centuries of horrors requires something like a domestic Marshall Plan. We need an ongoing program to lift up communities of the descendants of slaves, recognize and nurture their human potential, and overcome the enduring legacies of slavery once and for all. As a people founded on the principle that “all men are created equal,” what can we say if we fail? Can we look at ourselves in the mirror and claim that the last, best hope of mankind has learned anything since the Pharaohs enslaved the Jews? To me, that’s the meaning and the challenge of Juneteenth this year—a year steeped in tragedy, yet also in hope.

Strangers and distancing
Enclosed spaces and air flow
Duration of contact
Masks, gloves and hand washing
Conclusion

One of several sad things about being American today is that it’s hard to escape Donald Trump’s reality distortion field. You may despise the man, as I do, but he’s everywhere. And so are his lies, bottomless ignorance of science and fact, vain hopes and wishful thinking. He’s a skillful purveyor of beguiling falsehoods that push people’s emotional buttons.

Those who work in the federal government can’t escape him. He demands absolute loyalty and fealty to his personal “party line,” even as it changes and often reverses itself. So a universally acknowledged expert like Anthony Fauci must exercise all his advanced people skills and shade his message, just to avoid conflict with the Commander in Chief while still trying to inform the people.

If you want the unvarnished truth, you can’t trust anyone in the federal government to give it to you straight. You have to find real experts who have no official position and nothing to lose by telling the truth.

If you want the truth about Covid-19, you should start by reading this and this. Once you do, you will understand: (1) the vast universe of real and durable scientific ignorance and uncertainty surrounding this totally new virus and (2) the probability that we will not have a safe and effective vaccine that confers real and lasting immunity for years, if ever.

The most likely near-term outcome for this virus is that all Americans (and all humanity) will have to live with it until 60 - 70% of us have caught it and survived. Then we will have “herd immunity” throughout the nation and the globe.

Of course better outcomes are possible. Many, many experts are working on a vaccine with more advanced science, more resources and more knowledge than ever before. But rational people plan based on the most likely outcome, not the best case, don’t they?

With that in mind, I’ve made a personal decision not to get on an airplane again until vaccinated, if ever. My reasons are in part personal, and in part practical and realistic.

I just turned 75, and so I’m in the high-risk group. I’m in good physical shape, bicycle 8-12 miles a few times a week, and do calisthenics on most alternate days. But throughout my life I’ve been especially susceptible to colds and flu, catching bugs easily from travel, plane trips and hotel stays. So when we recently had to stay in a B & B on a 1,100-mile car trip, we took our own pillows, which we plan to disinfect after a waiting period.

These are my personal idiosyncrasies. But there are several universal reasons for refusing to fly during the reign of Covid-19 unless you have to. Here they are:

1. Strangers and distancing. From a contagion point of view, the worst thing about flying is that you never know who’ll be sitting right next to you. Airlines have promised distancing but don’t deliver. They can’t. In a time of rampant and unremitting financial losses, their profit motive is just too strong.

There are constant reports of full or nearly-full flights, as if the pandemic didn’t exist. So take out your mental tape measure and consider. In the three-and-three seating arrangement used on many domestic flights, you’d meet the six-foot rule only if you were in one window seat and the closest passenger were in the other, across the aisle on the other side of the plane.

Then what about longitudinal distancing? To keep the passengers in window seats six-feet apart, you’d have to skip several whole rows.

Of course a computer could probably devise a more “efficient” seating plan and pack a few more passengers in. But the truth is clear. There is absolutely no way that modern, packed-seat airplanes could maintain both six-foot distancing and even a 50% load factor. It’s just not going to happen.

Anyway, airline computer systems are not clairvoyant. They can’t predict in advance how many passengers will book a particular flight, especially when flights are much fewer than they were before the pandemic, and bookings can be rare and sporadic. Under those circumstances, the profit motive will keep airlines from programming their computers to enforce proper distancing on many, if not most, flights. And the airlines’ motives will always be diametrically opposed to yours: the more people and less distancing, the greater their profit or the smaller their loss.

Then there’s the whole other question of who’s the person sitting closest to you. Even if the airline requires a mask, will he or she keep it on? Will it ride up over your neighbor’s nose and mouth, where it does no good, so he or she can eat, drink, talk, sleep, snore, or just get some “relief”?

Airlines cannot and will not micromanage the behavior of people who are deniers, scofflaws, selfish, careless, or ignorant, or who just think they know better. So if you want to be realistic, you have to consider the risk that someone not wearing a mask, or wearing it negligently, will cough, sneeze, breathe, sing, shout or talk the virus all over you.

2. Enclosed spaces and air flow. As science slowly comes to grip with this entirely unprecedented virus, one thing is becoming clear. Outdoors is good. Indoors, in enclosed spaces, is bad for contagion.

There are two reasons for this. First, being outdoors allows room for proper distancing, in two and sometimes three dimensions. Second, the outdoor environment generally has winds or air currents that carry virus-laden droplets away. Even on days with little wind, small differences in solar heating create small currents.

As a result, a study of “super-spreader” contagion events in Wuhan, China showed [search for “Wuhan”] only one occurring outdoors. In contrast, the worst contagion events worldwide all have occurred in enclosed spaces: nursing homes, prisons, churches, and indoor funeral services.

It’s hard to imagine a more enclosed and unchanging indoor space than an airplane, in which people sit next to each other for an hour or more, getting up only to stretch or use the toilet.

That said, airline air-moving systems provide some relief. The moving air—which is mostly recirculated but partly fresh—goes through HEPA filters before being returned to the cabin. Those filters remove almost all bacteria and virus particles.

Years before this pandemic came, I exploited these facts for my personal safety. I opened the air vent over my seat full blast and directed it to form a laminar flow around my head. If the seat next to me was vacant, I did the same thing with the vent next to me. (I often had to wear a coat or jacket to keep warm despite this constant airflow.)

In theory, the laminar flow of cleaned air around my head and reduced the amount of pathogens that I would breathe. But there were two caveats. First, I had to maintain my position in the center of the flow by moving the vent every time I changed position. This got harder with newer air-vent systems, which make it harder to direct air streams. Second, my full-blast flow often chilled me and/or annoyed my seatmates, and I had to deal with that.

I did no scientific study, but I have the distinct impression that this precaution cut down the number of colds and flus I got while flying. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t rely on it to protect me from a potentially deadly virus. And I don’t know whether everyone’s using the same technique might cut the general cabin air flow down to the point of uselessness. Finally, recent pandemic-related studies of air flow in cabins suggest that droplets containing viruses (from a sneeze, for example) get circulated the full width of the cabin and several seating rows in each direction. I just don’t know how efficient the laminar flow of cleaned air coming in over my head would be in keeping that general viral circulation away from my head, or how much of it might get entrained in the air I breathe despite the protective laminar flow.

3. Duration of contact. In evaluating the risk of casual contact with strangers, time is obviously a key variable. The longer you are close to someone infected, the greater the chance of a virus-containing droplet being sucked into your airways as you breathe. This truth holds whether or not the infected person is wearing a mask. The risk is at least proportional to duration, but the relationship might be even stronger.

As a professor of law, I had some pre-pandemic experience with this variable. Catching colds and flus from students, both in class and in one-on-one conferences, is an occupational hazard of teachers of all kinds. So we had a rule of thumb—the “seven-minute” rule. If you kept your conferences with apparently sick students to seven or fewer minutes, you had a good chance of emerging unscathed. If longer, your chances of infection grew.

I have no idea what, if any, science lay behind this rule of thumb, but we all believed it. More to the point, the expert epidemiologist’s online interview that sparked this blog post provided generally similar time frames [search for “ten minutes”]. A close encounter for ten minutes with an infected person wearing no mask would likely cause infection, while it might be safe for up to twenty minutes with someone wearing a good mask well.

When you compare those time frames to the duration of airline flights—an hour for a short domestic flight and fourteen hours for trans-Pacific flights—you can quickly see the problem. On a long flight sitting right next to an infected person for hours at a time, escaping uninfected would seem a stroke of extreme good luck.

4. Masks, gloves and hand-washing. In the absence of an effective vaccine or cure, the most practical expedients for personal safety are masks, gloves, and frequent hand washing. Of course you always have control of how, when and how effectively you exploit these precautions. But what about the people around you?

To me, that’s the Achilles Heel of flying. In the age of Covid-19, you just don’t know who’ll be sitting near you, how close they’ll be, how seriously they take the whole risk of contagion, or whether and how effectively they’ll exploit these three basic precautions. Wearing gloves and not touching your face—at any time during the long flight—can avoid infection by contact. But what about the virus-laden airborne droplets from a nearby infected person, who may have no symptoms and may have no clue about his or her infection?

We all have some idea of the risks when we interact with our spouses or partners, our family, our close friends and our co-workers. We know because we know them. If we consider them careless or unreliable, we can take precautions accordingly. If they care about us, they’ll keep their distance or avoid all contact, or at least tell us when they don’t feel well. Then we can cut our contact, keep our distance, or even avoid contact altogether.

But you can’t do any of that with strangers flying with you on an airplane.

An EMT’s story from Daily Kos is instructive here. An unknown geezer approached him in a supermarket and berated him loudly at close quarters for wearing a mask, thereby increasing the risk of spreading the virus. Sure enough, that same stranger became the EMT’s patient later the same day, being carried in the EMT’s ambulance with an impossibly high blood pressure and heart rate.

The EMT-author chalked it all up to Karma. But I would go further. Emotional denial of unpleasant reality often gets stronger just before it breaks. This stranger probably had premonitions, conscious or subconscious, of coming down with Covid-19. Those premonitions may have made his denial in the supermarket so much more vehement and, through yelling in the EMT’s face, also much more dangerous. How do you know, while seated-belted in an airplane, that you’re not sitting next to someone just like that?

Conclusion

When you think about it, it’s hard to imagine a higher-risk exposure than flying today, except perhaps working in a hospital or nursing home handling Covid-19 patients. Even then, if you’re a caregiver you have a chance to limit your exposure with suitable PPE, or by distancing yourself and limiting the duration of contact. On an airplane, your chances of taking those precautions are limited or non-existent, and always subject to the flight crew’s rules and orders and what your fellow passengers will accept.

Airlines can and do take useful precautions with infected surfaces, sterilizing touch points after every flight and (with bathrooms) maybe after each use. But as scientific knowledge and experience with Covid-19 mounts, we are getting surer and surer that touch is only a minor means of contagion. In terms of unavoidable risk, contact by touch is almost irrelevant, because of the simple precautions you can take by wearing gloves, not touching your face, and washing your hands. The real risk is contaminated air, against which there are no simple, easy and reliable precautions.

So the primary means of contagion, and by far the most dangerous, is breathing. If the air we breathe has droplets containing the virus, they can infect us. And breathing is all the more dangerous when carriers of the disease can be totally asymptomatic or have minor symptoms that casual deniers can shrug off. That’s why Covid-19 is such a scary disease.

Maybe some enterprising firm will develop a disposable, head-only hazmat “suit,” with a clear plastic viewport, an air intake tube containing a thick HEPA filter backed up by closely packed carbon granules, and a total head enclosure with a velcro belt and “weatherstripping” for making an airtight but comfortable closure around the neck. That and rules letting me wear it are all it might take to reduce the risk of airborne contagion to an acceptable level for occasional, voluntary, non-essential travelers like me. But until I have such an helmet, or until I’ve been vaccinated safely and effectively, you won’t find me on an airplane any time while Covid-19 is still pandemic.

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