Overall COVID risk for air travel is low, study saysOverall SARS-CoV-2 attack rates in airplane flights under 4 hours were less than 1%, according to a study of 177 flights departing from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.
The results, published yesterday in Clinical Infectious Diseases, also indicated that people in the same row as an index case had the highest risk of infection.Among 5,797 passengers, 175 were index patients and led to an upward estimate of 34 secondary cases.
Estimates of attack rates had an upper bound of 0.60% and a lower bound of 0.3% (95% confidence intervals [CIs], 0.4% to 0.8% and 0.2% to 0.5%, respectively).