Despite commercial airlines mandating masks, there have been multiple documented events of COVID-19 superspreading on flights. We used available data from three flights, including cabin layout and seat locations of infected and uninfected passengers, to suggest interventions to mitigate COVID-19 superspreading events during air travel. Specifically, we studied: 1) London to Hanoi with 201 passengers, including 13 secondary infections among passengers; 2) Singapore to Hangzhou with 321 passengers, including 12 to 14 secondary infections; 3) a non-superspreading event on a private jet in Japan with 9 passengers and no secondary infections. We show that inclusion of passenger movement better explains the infection spread patterns than conventional models do. We also found that FFP2/N95 mask usage would have reduced infection by 95-100%, while cloth masks would have reduced it by only 40-80%. This suggests the need for more stringent guidelines to reduce aviation-related superspreading events of COVID-19.
@article{arxiv.2106.10313,
title = {Identifying Mitigation Strategies for COVID-19 Superspreading on Flights using Models that Account for Passenger Movement},
author = {Sirish Namilae and Yuxuan Wu and Anuj Mubayi and Ashok Srinivasan and Matthew Scotch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.10313},
year = {2021}
}