Filling middle seats on airplanes doubles the risk of catching Covid-19, study shows

from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is raising questions about the risks associated with packing planes full of people.

According to the paper, the risks are fairly low, in the grand scheme of things. However, they're still present, and there's a significant difference between the chances of catching the disease if the middle seats are blocked or filled. The analysis, Barnett wrote, is admittedly"rough," and is heavily based on statistics and figures published in a large meta-analysis in the journal The Lancet. It looked at infection rates of travelers coming from different parts of the US, estimated mitigation effects of mask wearing, and the distance between people in a row.

"Everything's riskier these days, so the question is, what do you want to compare it to," Barnett said."I don't know whether or not one wants to treat the risk as low." However, Barnett's model calculates the distance between passengers in both scenarios, and demonstrates that as distance between people increases, the risk of transmission decreases, regardless of whether that distance is above or below six feet. Because of that, the model finds the highest risk includes people in the same row as the person with COVID-19, as well as one row ahead and one row back.

"We must arrive at a solution that gives passengers the confidence to fly and keeps the cost of flying affordable," IATA director Alexandre de JuniacIATA, which describes blocking the middle seat as economically unfeasible,

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