Why can airplane travel expose you to a high concentration of germs if airlines say the area is cleansed with filters and the plane is cleaned regularly ?
In: Biology
Because the bags of germs that sit in the airports and in the seats next to you on the plane are full of germs and spread them around.
Maintenance crews/cleaners can wipe down hard surfaces and swap filters on a schedule, but the humans sitting next to you are constantly spreading germs with every exhale on your six hour flight.
Add to that the fact that travelers are usually sleep deprived and dehydrated by the dry air in airplanes, and you can see why many people get sick or feel bad after air travel.
If you take clorox wipes on the plane and wipe down each surface around your seat, take a look at the cloth and see how much nasty biofilm is on everything. I don’t think they actually clean very much.
Don’t forget to wipe around the window if you’re in the window seat, it’s one of the dirtiest surfaces.
I work in operating theatres. Some of our rooms are 4 metres high, 8 metres wide and long. 256 square metres of air. And our HAVC fans work so hard that most of the air is swapped every 2 minutes, and, every single molecule of air is exchanged every 6 minutes.
We still wear masks, we still stay away from the surgical field, and if we have an infectious patient, everyone in the room will wear a full gown and mask, not just the doctors and nurses scrubbed in.
Exchange systems mitigate risk, by reducing “dwell time” of droplet and airborne disease. But they can’t stop immediate proximity transmission. They’re not wind-tunnel-air-speeds blowing everything away immediately.
One detail I don’t see mentioned so far is that, at altitude, the atmosphere inside the aircraft is different to our normal outside air. Pressure is much lower (~ equivalent to 10.000 feet or 3000 meters) and humidity is very low (10 to 20%), both irritate our mucous membranes and make them more prone to infection.
The humidity is due to the outside temperature at 30.000+ feet being around -50°C, it just doesn’t hold any water.
You might not get I’ll from the person at the other end of the plane, but the 6-10 people in your immediate vicinity have a cloud of lung fumes around them which can get to you before the filter.
I don’t understand why people don’t wear well fitted masks on mass transit — I’m not interested in my holiday being ruined by catching COVID from some rube next to me on the bus/train/plane
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