On the 4 hour 40 minute Tel Aviv-Frankfurt flight there were 102 passengers on board, including a group of 24 tourists. The German authorities, having received information that the group had been in contact with a contaminated hotel manager in Israel, decided to test them upon arrival in Frankfurt and seven of them tested positive for coronavirus – later another seven would also test positive within a second. test-.
Four to five weeks later, investigators contacted the other 78 passengers, 90% of whom responded. Asked about their contacts and symptoms, and testing several of them, they found two passengers were infected during the flight, they were sitting across the aisle from the original seven cases.
For respiratory viruses, lVirologists traditionally consider the zone of contamination in an airplane to extend two rows in front and two rows behind. But surprisingly, a person sitting in the line immediately in front of that of two contagious tourists was not infected.
“The person in row 44 told us that he had a long conversation with the two in row 45,” said Sandra Ciesek, director of the Institute for Medical Virology in Frankfurt.
The two passengers sitting immediately behind another infected tourist were not contaminated either.. “We were surprised to find only two transmissions,” revealed Sebastian Hoehl, from the same institute.
Unfortunately, all the other passengers were not screened, so it cannot be ruled out that others were infected with the coronavirus.
The study confirms in all cases that transmissions on an airplane, in the absence of masks, are indeed possible. However, the researcher stressed that “Being the rate lower than expected, and none of the passengers have worn a mask, it is reassuring that we have not detected others.”
The researchers also noted that several studies of flights repatriation from Wuhan, China, at the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19, they established that no contamination had occurred on board, while the passengers were masked.
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