US Carriers, Covid-19, and You: They Still Don’t Get It.

By Robert McGarvey

We aren’t flying and evidence mounts that many frequent flyers are unpersuaded that their health is a concern of the carriers. Screamed a Travel Weekly headline: “Many frequent flyers won’t be back for a while.” 

It elaborated that, according to research by consulting firm ICF, “Without a Covid-19 vaccine or widespread testing, 22% of frequent American travelers don’t expect to fly domestically until after summer 2021, according to an ICF survey.

“For international travel, that number jumps 41%.”

We have every reason to be skeptical – even fearful – of air travel, airports, and public transportation. This is all made scarily vivid in the “Safe Travel Barometer” compiled by consulting and analytics firm VIDEC.  What the company did was look at a range of metrics – are middle seats empty? Are face masks required? Are hand sanitizers available? Are there traveler temperature checks? Do passengers submit a health declaration form, etc?

US carriers are woeful underperformers. There are steps carriers can take to protect passengers and crew. But many US carriers just are not implementing them. 

You don’t want Covid-19 and I know that because I have had it.  It sucked. No, I wasn’t hospitalized. But I felt miserable for nine or ten days.

I did not get it on a trip.  But having had it, I am more cautious about getting in contact with people and places that may bring an encore. (And there is some evidence that antibody immunity, if there is any at all is fleeting.)

If there’s a powerful take-away from the Videc research, it’s fly international carriers to stay healthier.

Noted VIDEC: “only 31% of North American airlines introduced thermal scanning – among them American Airlines, Air Canada and Frontier Airlines. In contrast, 88% of Middle East airlines and 70% of Asia Pacific airlines have already enacted pre-boarding traveler temperature checks. Further, with the recent exception of Southwest Airlines, most of the commercial carriers in North America do not enforce travelers from declaring their recent health details, versus 33% of Asia Pacific airlines already doing so.”

What VIDEC has created is a table with carrier names on the left, and then checkpoints: Temperature checks, face masks, hand sanitizer, health declaration form, empty middle seat, etc.

Delta, for instance, whiffs on temperature checks and health declaration forms.  It succeeds with face masks and empty middle seats.

Is that good enough?

Singapore Air, by contract, requires temperature checks, face masks, and health declaration forms, and middle seats are empty.

My advice: check the VIDEC scorecard before booking a flight – and of course stay mindful that with many carriers the rules and requirements are in flux. At first, the main US carriers said they required face masks, for instance, but soon we realized the rules were not enforced. But now, apparently, on most US carriers face masks are in fact required.  

Can we not debate what is a good screening tactic for Covid-19 and what isn’t?  You bet, and in fact there are reasons to think temperature checks, while easy enough to do fast, are not reliable. Said WHO:  “Temperature screening alone, at exit or entry, is not an effective way to stop international spread, since infected individuals may be in incubation period, may not express apparent symptoms early on in the course of the disease, or may dissimulate fever through the use of antipyretics; in addition, such measures require substantial investments for what may bear little benefits.”

WHO offers its perspective on useful screens: “It is more effective to provide prevention recommendation messages to travellers and to collect health declarations at arrival, with travellers’ contact details, to allow for a proper risk assessment and a possible contact tracing of incoming travellers.”

Boil it down and in my view what I need, at a minimum, from a carrier is an enforced face mask requirement, an empty middle seat, and a health declaration form.  Hand sanitizer should be readily available too.

What all this is, though, is a changing puzzle. We are at around 500,000 deaths worldwide (about 25% in the US).  There is so much we still don’t know.  Safety practices need to stay flexible and adaptable.

The one undebatable reality: there need be better safety practices to get more of us back in the air and traipsing through airports.  Progress is getting made: the US carrier new insistence on face masks is a step. We just need more steps.