United to ignore the CDC?
Screenshot by ZDNet
Your Zoom fatigue only gets worse.
Perhaps you have already been vaccinated, which has led to you being encouraged.
You want to get out. You want to see clients, colleagues and certain secret friends that you can always catch up with when you are traveling.
American airlines are on your side. They know that business travel will only return slowly. But even Delta is now preparing for a boom – in flight, not COVID-19 – by opening its middle seats from May 1st.
This unfortunately brings me to the very topic.
When COVID-19 invaded our shores, airlines begged the government for a lot of money, while passengers begged to fly at the same time. Yes, even in the middle seats.
Last summer, United Airlines chief communications officer Josh Earnest was the most decisive: “When it comes to blocking middle seats, it’s a PR strategy. It’s not a safety strategy.”
Oh, but then some big scientific brains suggested that might not be true. One suggested that there is twice the risk of catching COVID-19 if the middle seats are filled.
And now the CDC has conducted research entitled: “Laboratory modeling of reducing exposure to SARS-CoV-2 through physical distance in airplane cabins using bacteriophage aerosol.”
The short version? When the middle seats were left empty, there was a 23% to 57% decrease in exposure to viral particles considered viable. The methodological limitations of the research may be. It was executed with mannequins not wearing masks.
But you know when airlines want to stick their fingers in their ears and make loud, incomprehensible noises. They get pressure group Airlines for America – which some might consider Airlines for Airlines – to offer a joint pooh-pooh.
USA Today reports that Airlines for America insists that Harvard research shows that airline’s ventilation measures and other protective measures have so many things better that it can “do the proximity to which travelers are subject to flights”.
It would be boring to mention that airlines have provided some of the funding for this research. It would also be boring to mention that recent research from New Zealand has suggested that COVID-19 can really spread quite widely on a long-haul flight.
Let us rather focus on how many airlines believe in their own PR.
If everything is just as good with packing planes into their gills, why is Southwest Airlines trying to stop passengers from ordering by using their voice? Yes, even while wearing masks.
And why are United Airlines flight attendants also worried that the provision of snacks will again lead to a ‘toxic environment’?
It seems that the entire business models of airlines these days need to move as many seats as possible, as close to each other as possible to maximize revenue.
This may not be the best way to reassure passengers with a deviant regal hand on research that goes against your desire to make money.
Yet the airlines know that people have been hooked up for over a year now, which is why the people are very motivated to be hooked up in a plane for a few hours to smell the ocean air again.
But if you fly for business, you will not get anything from the ocean air? (Will you?) Maybe your decision parameters may be different.
Or is the desperation to get away from Zoom and Microsoft Teams just too powerful to resist?