WASHINGTON — The U.S. Departments of Transportation, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and State have established a new web portal where airline passengers can obtain updated information on how to Fly Healthy this holiday season. The portal walks you through every step of the process: plan your travel; at the airport; aboard the aircraft; arrival at your destination, and returning home.
Passengers making plans to return to air travel during the COVID-19 public health crisis are encouraged to visit the portal before heading to the airport. The experience as an airline passenger begins at home, planning and taking precautions to help everyone have a safe journey while preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Following these and other federal travel guidance will help ensure airline passengers can Fly Healthy for the holidays and safely negotiate all aspects of air travel. Recommendations include, among others:
Trip Planning: Before booking your trip, check for international travel advisories and destination-specific COVID-19 risk. Refer to individual state, territorial, tribal, and local government websites for domestic travel advisories and information about quarantine or other restrictions.
At the Airport: Once you arrive at the airport and exit your vehicle, start wearing your mask. This includes on shuttle buses, trams and any time you are outside your own vehicle on airport grounds.
Aboard the Aircraft: Wear your mask aboard the aircraft, practice good sanitation, and maintain as much social distance as possible. Be sure to pack extra masks for yourself and your party in your carry-on.
Arrival at Your Destination State, local, and territorial governments may have travel restrictions in place, including testing requirements, stay-at-home orders, and quarantine requirements upon arrival.
Returning Home: You may have been exposed to COVID-19 on your travels. Regardless of where you traveled or what you did during your trip, take action to protect others from getting sick after you return.
The Federal Aviation Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Transportation Security Administration, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection collaborated on the guidance supporting these recommendations.
Additional information to better protect airline passengers, crew, and other airport workers can be found in the Runway to Recovery publication, a joint guidance initiative from the Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, and Health and Human Services
https://www.transportation.gov/flyhealthy
Starting at the end of September, all tourists staying at a hotel in the Dominican Republic will be temporarily granted a travel assistance plan that will include emergency coverage, telemedicine services, long-stay accommodation and flight change costs in case of getting infected with COVID-19. This insurance will be provided at no cost to the visitor until December 2020, covered 100% by the Dominican Government. For more details, please visit: https://www.godominicanrepublic.com/
(bluejayphoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images) Photo by bluejayphoto/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images
San Francisco Travel, the city's official destination marketing organization, is asking visitors to commit to safe and responsible practices by signing the new Safe Travel Pledge. The Safe Travel Pledge encourages future visitors to come to San Francisco and to do so responsibly. This pledge is designed to remind people not only of what to expect when they visit the city, but what is expected of them as well.
Since launching on July 29, 420 people have proactively committed to the ten-point pledge to follow health and safety guidelines designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. 62% of those who have signed the safe travel pledge live in California, with 32% being residents of San Francisco and 21% located in Northern California outside of San Francisco. 38% of those who signed are located outside of California.
People signing the pledge proactively promise to abide by the following tenants for traveling and visiting safely:
Wear a mask or other face covering when in public spaces.
Maintain physical distance from others while exploring the city.
Practice good hygiene to lower the risk of spreading or contracting disease.
Follow all local public health orders, even if they are different from the ones where I live.
Research the changes that local hotels, attractions, and businesses have made before I travel so that I can be a responsible visitor.
Support local businesses that form the character and culture of San Francisco's many different neighborhoods.
Use contactless payment methods wherever possible.
Be patient with and respectful to the workers in San Francisco's hotels, restaurants, and stores, who are all adjusting to new protocols and procedures.
Preserve and protect the places I visit by not littering or leaving things behind.
Lead by example and share these practices with other travelers.
"As we prepare to welcome people back to San Francisco, we want to encourage visitors to do their part to keep themselves and our residents safe, too. Our Safe Travel Pledge is a way for visitors to show that they are committed to traveling responsibly," said San Francisco Travel President and CEO Joe D'Alessandro. "The fact that almost 40% of those who signed the pledge are potential visitors from outside of California shows that we are starting to reach people outside of California, and they are signaling that they want to travel safely as soon as the city is open for leisure travel."
The San Francisco Travel Association is the official destination marketing organization for the City and County of San Francisco. For information on reservations, activities and more, visit http://www.sftravel.com or call 415-391-2000.
For information on reservations, activities and more, visit http://www.sftravel.com or call 415-391-2000. For more about San Francisco, follow on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Please use hashtags #sftravel and #AlwaysSF.
San Francisco International Airport (SFO) offers non-stop flights to more than 50 international cities on 44 international carriers. The Bay Area's largest airport connects non-stop with 85 cities in the U.S. on 12 domestic airlines. In SkyTrax Passengers' Choice Awards for 2020, SFO was the highest-rated airport in the United States, ranking third worldwide behind airports in Toronto and Barcelona. For up-to-the-minute departure and arrival information, airport maps and details on shopping, dining, cultural exhibitions, ground transportation and more, visit http://www.flysfo.com. Follow SFO on http://www.twitter.com/flysfo and http://www.facebook.com/flysfo.
United Airlines is the preferred airline of the San Francisco Travel Association.
Is it safe to ride public transit during the coronavirus pandemic?
It depends on a variety of factors, but there are ways to minimize risk.
The main way that the virus spreads is through droplets people spray when they talk, cough or sneeze. That means the best way to reduce the spread of infection on public transit and elsewhere is to wear and mask and stay 6 feet from others, experts say.
Transit systems around the world are requiring riders to wear masks and encouraging people to socially distance. Compliance could vary, especially as ridership levels start rebounding and trains and buses get more crowded. But there are other steps you can take to make trips less risky.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests traveling during non-peak hours, avoiding crowded spots in stations and stops, and skipping rows between seats when possible.
Surfaces are also believed to pose a risk, though to a lesser degree, and transit systems are employing a variety of cleaning techniques. Moscow and Shanghai have experimented with germ-killing ultraviolet light and Hong Kong has deployed a robot that sprays hydrogen peroxide. In New York, subways are shut down overnight overnight for cleaning.
Even so, the CDC says to avoid touching surfaces such as turnstiles and handrails if you can.
Planes have not been the sites of superspreading events, at least so far.
Tray tables up.
Photographer: Andrew Matthews/PA Images
If you decide to fly, the odds that you will pick up Covid-19 are low, according to one expert analysis. Despite the known dangers of crowded, enclosed spaces, planes have not been the sites of so-called superspreading events, at least so far.
That’s not to say flying is perfectly safe — safety is relative and subjective. But as restrictions continue to change, the only way to move forward through this long pandemic is to start thinking in terms of risk-benefit ratios. Very little is without risk, but perhaps some risks — such as flying — are small enough to warrant taking.
Arnold Barnett, a professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been trying to quantify the odds of catching Covid-19 from flying. He’s factored in a bunch of variables, including the odds of being seated near someone in the infectious stage of the disease, and the odds that the protection of masks (now required on most flights) will fail. He’s accounted for the way air is constantly renewed in airplane cabins, which experts say makes it very unlikely you’ll contract the disease from people who aren’t in your immediate vicinity — your row, or, to a lesser extent, the person across the aisle, the people ahead of you or the people behind you.
What Barnett came up with was that we have about a 1/4300 chance of getting Covid-19 on a full 2-hour flight — that is, about 1 in 4300 passengers will pick up the virus, on average. The odds of getting the virus are about half that, 1/7700, if airlines leave the middle seat empty. He’s posted his results as a not-yet-peer-reviewed preprint.
The odds of dying of a case contracted in flight, he found, are even lower — between 1 in 400,000 and 1 in 600,000 — depending on your age and other risk factors. To put that in perspective, those odds are comparable to the average risk of getting a fatal case in a typical two hours on the ground.
The numbers all sound low enough, though Barnett says they are still high compared to the 1 in 34 million odds your flight will end in a deadly crash. He told me he wouldn’t fly right now because his age, 72, puts him at higher risk than the average American, and he says you have to consider the risk of adding to the problem by getting the virus and unknowingly passing it on to
The Chances Of Getting Covid-19 on a Plane is Slim
Arnold Barnett estimates that you have a 1/4300 chance of picking up the virus on a full, 2-hour flight
Source: Covid-19 Risk Among Airline Passengers, medRxiv, 2020
Other experts have been mixed on whether they, personally, would fly. The Boston Globe recently reported that of 15 epidemiologists and infectious disease experts surveyed, 13 said they would not fly at this time — however it wasn’t clear whether they had any reason to get on a plane.
University of Massachusetts biology professor Erin Bromage says he is flying every week, as he advises federal, state and district courts on how to reopen while minimizing risks. Whereas many experts are taking a zero-tolerance for risk approach, he’s trying to find a middle ground — and helping others do it in a rational way.
Drawing on a background in industrial mechanics and pilot training (an injury forced him to switch career paths into biology), Bromage says that the air exchange system in planes is better than in hospitals, with the air in the cabin being completely replaced 30 times every hour. He agrees with MIT’s Barnett, though, that it’s possible to transmit the disease to or from your close neighbors.
He and Barnett both suggested that customers should, if possible, choose an airline, such as Jet Blue, that promises to keep the middle seat open. That cuts way back on the odds of getting or giving the virus. JetBlue also promises that solo travelers won’t have a neighbor in a two-seat row.
Real-world data bodes well for flying, too. Australia has been using contact tracing to investigate Covid transmission on hundreds of flights, and has found that while infected people got on planes, nobody got infected on a plane. Worldwide, there have been a couple of individual transmissions possibly linked to flights, but no superspreading-type events.
Assuming we’ll be living with this disease for months to come, we will need ways to separate low-risk activities from high-risk ones. Keeping informed of relative risks can help us do that. By worrying less about the relatively safer part of a trip — the actual flight — we can pay more attention to the potentially riskier parts, such as crowds and tightly packed lines at the airport.
Of course, we’re all obligated to avoid adding to the spread of the disease, and this means taking precautions in the air, such as wearing a mask and staying home if sick, and keeping a distance from others at the airport.
What happens at your destination matters too. Traveling around and mingling with distant contacts can increase the risk of spreading the virus more than mingling with a comparable number of people closer to home. So people can help themselves and others by driving their own cars to the airport and renting cars wherever they arrive, rather than taking taxis or ride-shares.
In the old normal, Bromage would wrap up his advisory duties and have dinner with the people he’s working with. Now, he just goes back to his hotel room. “It’s quite lonely,” he says. Like so much this year, it’s a compromise.
Trip Planning: Before booking your trip, check for international travel advisories and destination-specific COVID-19 risk. Refer to individual state, territorial, tribal, and local government websites for domestic travel advisories and information about quarantine or other restrictions.
At the Airport: Once you arrive at the airport and exit your vehicle, start wearing your mask. This includes on shuttle buses, trams and any time you are outside your own vehicle on airport grounds.
Aboard the Aircraft: Wear your mask aboard the aircraft, practice good sanitation, and maintain as much social distance as possible. Be sure to pack extra masks for yourself and your party in your carry-on.
Arrival at Your Destination State, local, and territorial governments may have travel restrictions in place, including testing requirements, stay-at-home orders, and quarantine requirements upon arrival.
Returning Home: You may have been exposed to COVID-19 on your travels. Regardless of where you traveled or what you did during your trip, take action to protect others from getting sick after you return.
The Federal Aviation Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Transportation Security Administration, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection collaborated on the guidance supporting these recommendations.
Additional information to better protect airline passengers, crew, and other airport workers can be found in the Runway to Recovery publication, a joint guidance initiative from the Departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, and Health and Human Services
https://www.transportation.gov/flyhealthy
